


Star, Cross and Dirt

by pprfaith



Series: Road to Morning [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Typical Violence, Case Fic, Coma, Crossover, Gen, Horror, Mystery, Post Chosen, Season 3, Supernatural - Freeform, There shoud probably be a horror tag here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-17
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-25 11:20:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 37,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1646798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Hollow Springs, Colorado, people are randomly falling asleep and not waking up. Enter Winchesters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> New A/N: This is a repost of a series that currently clocks in at roughly 160k and 8 stories. Updates as I sift through it and fix up some things. 
> 
> Original A/N: This started out as a tag to _Jus in Bello_. Then it grew AU. Then it grew a Buffy. Then it grew a plot and _then_ it grew a prequel. This is that prequel. Woe is my brain.
> 
> Hollow Springs is my invention, as are the people in it. The location of the town was picked by pulling up a map of the USA and looking for a nice, empty spot of land. Not meant to offend anyone living roundabout there. Please don’t bitch at me about the car. It’s love. You’ll know what I mean when you read it.

+

**Zero**

+

“Christ,” Dean cursed rather loudly, shaking out the hand he had just used to punch his opponent in the jaw. “What the hell’s that guy made of? Lead?”

Then, not really expecting an answer, he spun to check on Sammy who’d had his back for most of the action, but had somehow gotten lost in the chaos of a good old-fashioned bar fight. Winchesters versus a gang of rowdy bikers that had just lost horribly to Dean’s pool hustling skills. It was a classic scenario. 

Sam, feeling his brother’s searching look before he even called his name, raised a hand to wave limply, worrying at his front teeth with his tongue. He had a nasty scratch from a flying beer bottle on his left cheek, but otherwise seemed unharmed. Dean breathed a silent sigh of relief and finally took the time to assess the damage they’d caused as the bar’s occupants that had not been involved in the fight started popping back up out of their hiding places of choice.

No less than seven men in full biker regalia were strewn about the room, along with roughly two dozen bottles and glasses. Three chairs were broken, splinters all over the place, along with two tables. A lifetime of making do told Dean that only one of them was a lost cause. The other could be easily salvaged. Two broken picture frames and three pool cues were added to the tally. 

All in all, the bar’s interior looked a lot better than it could have, which alleviated his guilty conscience somewhat. The owner of the place wasn’t to blame for his dick-headed customers. Still, if the fight hadn’t started – and mostly stayed – on the small dance floor, there would have been a lot more wood and glass littering the floor. 

Soundlessly his brother came to a halt next to him, both of them focusing on the people crawling out from behind their tables, apprehensive. None of them looked likely to attack them in defense of the idiots on the floor. Dean had won his money fair and square and there were witnesses for that. While that didn’t mean much in places like this, the fact that seven men were out cold and the two brothers were still standing did.

Dean had taken out four, Sammy had taken three at his back. They may have looked like college kids with attitude, but they had laid out their opponents in less than five minutes.

Plus – Dean looked down to check and yep – his flannel shirt had gotten pulled up his back by a lucky grab, leaving the shining metal of the gun tucked into his waistband very, very visible. No wonder no-one was approaching them.

Dangerous _and_ armed. He hoped no-one had unfrozen enough to call the cops, yet. 

Tucking the shirt back down where it belonged, Dean flashed the timid looking waitress his best conman grin, ignoring the way she flinched back slightly. Can’t get them all, right?

“Dean?” Sam asked wearily, without looking at him.

“Yeah?” Dean returned, _not_ saying Sam’s name, in case someone _did_ call the cops, but the kid never seemed to remember that little detail.

“Stop flirting.”

“Bitch.”

The ritualistic response was cut off by the sound of Alice in Chains’ _Rooster_ sounding from the front pocket of Dean’s jeans. He frowned, digging around until beer-sticky fingers closed around his cell phone and pulled it out, checking the display before flipping it open.

It was Bobby.

“Yes?” he answered, tersely.

Bobby immediately picked up on it and stifled whatever he’d been about to say in order to ask, “Bad time?”

“Kinda,” Dean admitted, conveying both that yes, it was a bad time and no, they were not about to have their asses handed to them by a pack of ravaging werewolves or something similar.

He could practically hear Bobby nod and scratch his beard. “Call me back. I got a job for you boys.”

Nodding at the phone, Dean agreed and hung up without saying goodbye. 

“Got a job,” he told his brother as he stuffed his phone back where it belonged and dug his winnings out of another pocket. He peeled five twenties off the bundle, hesitated, looked around and then added another because he’d been having real, honest fun before the fight had broken out. 

He slapped the money on the bar top, grinned at the waitress again and then spun on his heel, marching out, Sam half a step behind him.

The entire room was still dead silent. Armed, dangerous and doing random ‘jobs’. Great. People were going to start thinking they were the mob.

+

Half an hour later saw Sam and Dean in the positions they were most often in: Dean behind the Impala’s steering wheel with Sam riding shotgun, a pile of papers and newspaper clippings on his lap as he sorted through potential hunts.

The pile had grown enormously in the month since the Devil’s Gate had opened, as all the demons that had escaped started causing bloody, deadly mischief all over the place. It had gotten so bad that their only way of prioritizing hunts had become vicinity. The closer the job was, the faster they could get there, get it done, and move on. 

At least now, with the Colt again, they had an easier time of actually getting rid of the demons they hunted – permanently. 

But lately, although neither of the Winchesters was ever going to say it out loud, lest they jinx themselves, things seemed to have settled down. The first wave of demons had been mostly defeated and those that were left had gone to ground. The last few days, they had actually been enjoying their first downtime since killing Azazel. Until Bobby called.

At the moment, however, Sam was looking for one very specific clipping instead of randomly sorting through the pile, his cell phone wedged between his ear and shoulder as he told Bobby, “Hold on a second, I almost… here it is. Unexplained coma cases in Hollow Springs, Colorado. But Bobby, the thing’s over two months old.”

Dean strained to hear the older hunter’s answer but couldn’t make out much over the rumble of the engine so he simply settled back, content to wait until Sam was done.

Five minutes later, Sam nodded at nothing in particular, “Yeah, you’re right, that _is_ strange. We just entered Wyoming so we’re not too far away. I gotta talk to Dean first, but we’ll probably check it out. I’ll…”

He trailed off as Dean waved a hand in front of his brother’s face and then nodded when Sam looked at him, giving his silent approval of whatever was going on. He trusted Sam and he trusted Bobby’s research. If they thought there was a hunt to be had and Sam thought it worthwhile, he was okay with it. 

“Dean says okay. We’ll call you tomorrow after we’ve checked things out, okay?”

Another thing that had changed since the Devil’s Gate: The check-ins. Once upon a time, Dean would have chafed – did chafe – against regularly calling in with anyone, be they Bobby, his father, or even Ellen. They did whatever they wanted to, whenever, wherever and owed no explanations to anyone. But with that literal black cloud looming over all of them, and Dean’s time slowly but surely trickling away to nothing, well, he suddenly found that calling in with Bobby to let him know where they were and what they were planning wasn’t such a bad thing. 

If they got trapped, hurt, or stuck somewhere, Bobby would move heaven and hell to find them. It was a new kind of comfort. 

Sam said his last goodbyes and flipped his phone shut, wriggling in his seat to stuff it back into his pocket. Then he jammed his loose research into the glove compartment, toed off his sneakers, and pulled his knees to his chest, folding his giant body sideways into his seat, leaning against the door. 

Dean said nothing, waiting for his little brother to hammer out the details and facts in his head. He would explain as soon as he had it all lined up. 

“You heard about the coma cases?” At Dean’s nod, he continued, “It started three months ago. Teenaged girl failed to wake up one morning. No sign of disease or trauma that anyone could find. She just fell asleep and was gone. Since then, seventeen more people have gone to sleep and never woken up.”

“Why didn’t some other hunter take the job months ago?” Dean asked, knowing perfectly well how hunters worked. It was rare that something this big was left alone for any period of time, especially once Bobby had caught wind of it. Since he had stopped hunting everything he found himself, the man had started a sort of hunting central. He found a job, called a hunter he knew was close, and gave it away. Three months was too long for a job to be left untouched.

“Apparently, someone at the Roadhouse said they were going down there to check it out. Nobody knows who that was, or if they even went. Loads of people died when the Roadhouse went down and everyone’s been busy since. It slipped to the bottom of the list, I guess.”

“Alright. We got anything else?”

“No connection between the victims that Bobby could find. Various ages, ethnicities, jobs, genders, sexual orientations. There’s no common factor in any of their lives, except that they all live in Moffat County. At first he thought Shtriga, but those usually only take kids because there’s more life force in them.”

“Could it be a Shtriga that’s somehow limited? Injured? So it has to take whatever it gets?” 

Sam frowned, digging his toes into the upholstery and stopping immediately when Dean slapped his leg for defiling his car with his smelly feet. “I don’t know, man. Could be, but seventeen victims? Shtrigas don’t take that much.”

“Eighteen,” Dean corrected.

“What?” 

“You said that one girl, plus seventeen others. Makes eighteen. Use your fingers _and_ your toes, Sammy.”

Instead of complaining about the use of that stupid childhood nickname – he hadn’t in a long time, not since Dean had gotten himself electrocuted and almost killed, not since he’d had to imagine life without anyone calling him Sammy ever again – Sam rolled his eyes and smirked. People tended to look at his big brother’s ripped jeans and bright smile, and file him away under stupid eye-candy but fact was, Dean was smart. Probably as smart as Sam was. He just had absolutely no interest in using those smarts for anything but the job he loved.

“Whatever,” he said, just so Dean wouldn’t have the last word.

People always said no-one could pick a pattern like John Winchester. Sam was the only one who knew that half of the time, it had been Dean who had put together the patterns from the clippings, notes and maps left out by their tired father. 

And now there were only ten months, twenty-nine days, and twenty-one hours left until Sam would have to find his own patterns without his big brother’s callused hand and acerbic advice to shove him in the right direction.

He closed his eyes as Dean cranked up Blue Oyster Cult – not _Don’t Fear the Reaper_ , not now and never again – and let himself drift to sleep, the presence of his brother soothing him better than anything else could.

+


	2. Chapter 2

+

**One**

+

Hollow Springs was a small town, like roughly a million others Sam had been to in his life. 

There were rows and rows of neat little houses with neat little front lawns and neat little white fences. Neat dogs playing with neat kids on neat roads, where no-one ever broke the speed limit. A shopping mall and a small hospital, a school next door, a high school at the outskirts of town. A monument or two, with stories attached that drew a few hundred tourists every year and a diner to feed them and keep the locals in coffee and gossip. A few little Mom and Pop shops that shouldn’t survive until the next generation, but somehow always did.

Small town America for postcards and holiday snapshots, happy, colorful, joyful and always, eternally boring and normal. 

Unlike everyone else passing through, though, Sam had always known that there was a rotten core at every one of those towns. A man who slaughtered his whole family and came back to repeat their deaths endlessly. A child that took a shotgun to Daddy’s chest and fled into the woods, becoming something less than human with hunger and rage. Domestic abuse, alcohol and racism, drugs and hate. Sam had seen every single vile human emotion that hid in these towns and made monsters in the basements and backyards, where no-one saw. 

Still, once upon a time his stomach had clenched with need and envy every single time he had entered a place like this, sitting in the Impala, knowing that he’d be gone again in a week. He’d craved the front lawns with the dogs and the kids and the stars and stripes and apple pies on Sundays. He’d craved them with his entire being.

For a while, he’d had them. 

He’d lived his dream and paid in Jessica’s blood for it.

And now his father was dead and Dean was dying and the world was already more or less gone to hell. And he couldn’t imagine a place where he wanted to be more than right here, next to his brother, kicking ass and fighting hell itself to find a way to keep Dean here. Funny how things changed.

He shifted in his seat, slipping forward, and lazily pointed Dean to the right at the next turn. 

“Motel should be just ahead,” he said, quickly putting away the Google Map he’d printed out at their last stop. Dean, for some unfathomable reason, hated Google Maps. It was one of the many, many things Sam would never understand about his brother but took good-naturedly. Most of the time. 

They both had their quirks and after a lifetime of literally living inside each other’s personal space, it had become pretty much an automatic behavior to accommodate the other’s weirdness. Dean hated Google Maps and always slept closer to the door. Sam left his towels on the floor and tended to go ballistic if someone messed up his research. Both obsessed about their weapons and Dean had a tendency to torture the toothpaste tube into a pretzel within a week of buying it. Sam always forgot to pick up forks when he got them takeout and their ongoing war about what constituted good music was legendary.

“Dude, you with me?” Dean demanded, waving a hand in Sam’s face, startling him out of his thoughts. They were already parked in front of the motel’s main building and Dean was obviously about to go and check them in.

“Yeah,” Sam answered, straightening. He needed to put a lid on this new tendency to get maudlin over the smallest things. Dean wasn’t going to die. He wouldn’t let him. There was no reason to wallow like this. “Yeah, I’m with you.”

Dean leaned back in his seat. “Good. I’ll get us a room. You figure out who we are today.”

+

They were Darren Walcott and Simon Deacon, Federal Marshalls, checking into the strange coma cases because they suspected foul play. Dean wanted to say they suspected terrorism, but Sam insisted on ‘foul play’ because it was less likely to cause a panic that would draw unwanted attention to them. And that was the last thing ever said about their new identities.

Dean exchanged his beat up leather jacket for one that looked a bit less like on-the-run criminal, and Sam did up a few more buttons on his shirt and turned on the little boy charm to get them past Nurse Patty, who kept shooting sideways glances at Dean’s butt. 

“Doctor Miller is the one responsible for the coma patients. You’d best talk to him, dear. I can show you and your partner,” cue the sideways look and of course Dean had noticed and was modeling his behind in a painfully obvious fashion, “to his office if you’d like. We’ll have to take the stairs, though. The elevator isn’t quite working.”

Oh, this one was sly. She came out from behind her station and waved them to go ahead, eyes fixed on Dean who was enjoying this way too much. They let Patty lead them up one floor and then two doors to the right – impossible to find without insider help, Sam was sure – where she left them with a piece of paper with her number scribbled on it. Sam waited until she was out of sight before punching his brother in the shoulder.

“Ouch! What was that for?”

“Man, you almost strained something wiggling your ass!”

“Did not,” Dean predictably defended himself. “She just likes me.”

“You didn’t even speak to her!”

The older Winchester’s grin widened. “I know. I’m just that good.”

Sam made a disgusted noise at the back of his throat and shoved his brother forward for good measure before knocking at the good doctor’s door. A friendly ‘come in’ sounded after only a few seconds and they both entered the room with their Marshall personas firmly in place, bickering completely forgotten. 

Sometimes it scared Sam, how many different personalities they could both jump between without a hitch. His last count had yielded over two dozen different personalities between the two of them, starting with Dean, your friendly, if not too bright, neighborhood plumber and not ending with Sam, the fed who liked to throw around big words and steal the local police’s donuts.

Doctor Miller was a tall, slim man, wiry despite being middle-aged. His eyes were bright, his smile honest but tired. He looked like one of those rare doctors that had gotten into the profession not for the money or the prestige, but out of an honest desire to help people, to make people better. 

Involuntarily, Sam’s own smile became a little more real in response.

“Well, Marshalls, how can I help you?”

“We’re here about your mysterious coma patients, sir,” Dean offered, holding out his hand to shake. The doctor accepted it and nodded. 

“Of course, of course. I have been waiting for someone like you to drop by for a while now. It’s just too strange.” He released Dean’s hand and waved them over to his desk and into the two visitor chairs placed in front of it. 

They sat and Sam jumped right in. “Could you give us an overview of the history? It started three months ago, right? The first victim was a teenager, female, Caucasian?”

Nodding, Miller agreed, “Yes. Linda Carmichael, sixteen years old. Her mother couldn’t wake her up one morning and called an ambulance. I was the one who did the initial examination.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” the older man sighed, frustrated, and ran a hand through hair that already looked like he repeated the gesture often. 

“What d’you mean, nothing? There’s gotta be something, right?” Dean leaned forward in his seat. 

“No. Heart rate and pulse of my patients are steady and regular, if a bit slow for my tastes. They react to no outward stimulus, be that sound, light, motion, or even pain. Their brain activity is practically zero. For all intents and purposes, those people are brain-dead, but their bodies function perfectly normal, showing no strain. They seem to be in no pain.”

Sam mentally noted down all the symptoms to detail them later in his dad’s journal before asking, “Who was the next victim? After Linda?”

“That was Martin Rodriguez, ten days later, age forty-six. Nine days after him, Samuel Green, twenty-five. Seven days after that, Michelle Hamilton, fifty-three. Absolutely no connection between any of them that we could find. No food they all ingested, no drugs they all took, not even places they all were. They didn’t even know each other, other than by sight. All exhibiting the exact same symptoms.”

The good doctor looked like he was about to smack his head into a wall. Frustrated, tired, overworked and at the end of his rope. Sam wished it was the first time he’d seen a good man so utterly wrung out, but it wasn’t. It was, however, the first time he seriously considered telling the man what was going on. Miller seemed ready to believe just about anything, as long as it would help his patients. Unfortunately, or fortunately, if you asked Dean, they didn’t know anything and so Sam had nothing to share. 

“So there has been no change in any of them for three whole months? They haven’t gotten better or worse?”

The doctor looked up from where he had been studying his desktop, surprised. “You don’t know? Those four victims are awake. They have been for almost two months now.”

Blinking very slowly and hiding their surprise, both brothers turned to exchange heavy glances. No, they hadn’t known that four of the eighteen victims were awake and well. What kind of thing knocked people out and then suddenly let them go? Why hadn’t Bobby known this? Sam had checked himself, nothing of the kind had ever been made public.

“You kept this quiet?” he guessed, mostly to cover up how completely startled he and Dean both were. This was definitely not the usual MO of the things they hunted. Even if they had no clue what they were hunting, letting people live after they’d been clearly taken over by something was generally not what evil critters did, unless stopped and killed.

“The circumstances of their awakening were very strange, you understand. We thought it prudent to not say much until we better understood what was going on. Alas, two months later we still know nothing and we have fourteen new patients.”

“The four who recovered had no insights?” Dean wanted to know. It was a relevant question. Often people told the truth and nobody listened because they sounded crazy. If they had anything ‘strange’ to say, they needed to find those people and find out what they knew. 

Yet another headshake, “They all remember going to sleep and then waking up at the hospital. No memory of anything in between.”

“Alright then, how did they wake? And when? At the same time? Or after a specific period of time?”

Sam, nodding along to his brother’s questions, forced himself to relax into his chair and not appear too eager.

“They all woke within a minute or two of each other, like waking up from a good night’s sleep, remembering nothing. They didn’t even dream. We thought it was over, that we could just forget what happened and move on but, and this is the strange thing. The very next morning, another patient was brought in. A Jane Doe from out of town. She’d been here only a couple of days and was found asleep in her room. 

“She was the first one of the second wave. Six more that month and seven in the three weeks since.” First four a month, then seven and now another seven in only three weeks.

“So whatever it is, it’s spreading faster.”

“Yes. And we still have no idea how to fight it. The only possible clue I have at this stage is that one of the patients exhibits symptoms that do not match the others’.”

“What’re those?” This time, Sam couldn’t help leaning forward eagerly. A break in the pattern was always a weak spot, a mistake that could be used to unravel whatever as going on.

“This patient displays symptoms of physical stress at irregular intervals, always at night. Perspiration. Elevated heart rate and pulse. Movement of the eyes, like in REM sleep. Occasionally, even movement. Brief, and I mean less than a second long, spikes in brain activity. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this patient is suffering from nightmares.”

Dean leaned back, suddenly slumping, a worried expression on his face. “Let me guess. The patient that doesn’t fit the pattern is your Jane Doe.”

“Yes.”

There was a lull in conversation as Miller slumped behind his desk, exhausted and visibly more tired than before their visit, and Dean and Sam both mulled over what they had just learned. 

The first four victims waking up the very same night a fifth victim falls into a coma. A victim no-one knows, from out of town, who exhibits different symptoms and shows up at the exact point in time where the pattern breaks, like a sort of turning point. The conclusion was inevitable, even if one didn’t know about the things that went bump in the night: Jane Doe had something to do with this whole thing. She was more than a victim. 

Maybe she was channeling this thing, whatever it was. Maybe she had found a way to fight it. Maybe it just naturally reacted to her differently, because there was something about her that was not like the others. Could it be that she was from out of town? Maybe there was a common factor to all the other victims after all and she didn’t have that factor giving her what, a better chance at fighting back?

Better question: If all patients were practically brain dead, how come they could wake in perfect mental condition? Where did their minds go while the slept? And why did Jane still have measurable brain activity? Was she still linked to her body, unlike the others?

Sam was giving himself a headache with all those questions and no-one to bounce them off of. Once they were back at their room, he and Dean would start throwing ideas on the table and work out a theory, but it took the two of them to do it. On their own, they both gave themselves sleepless nights when worrying over cases like this one. They had, over a lifetime of deadly puzzles, gotten used to the other telling them when they were being an idiot and chasing dead ends.

“Can we see them? The patients? In particular your Jane Doe?”

Sam looked at his brother out of the corner of his eye. Why did Dean want to see Jane Doe? Did he think she was… what?

Raising a questioning eyebrow, Sam received a brief flick of the hand in response. It was a sign they had made up years and years ago, meaning ‘human with skills’. Psychics, witches, seers, people that were basically human, but had more than human skills. There was a matching sign for ‘not human’ and for ‘completely human’.

The ability to classify your enemy without letting them know about it was dead useful sometimes. Plus, if Sam remembered correctly, they’d both been bored out of their minds the day they had made up those signs. There was one for ‘I want pizza’ as well. 

So Dean thought Jane was more than a simple human and had somehow interfered with the thing that was doing this to people, making her not a symptom of the break in pattern, but the cause. 

Sam gave a vague nod of agreement combined with a shrug of his shoulder in response and stood to follow the good doctor out of his office and down the long, Navajo White corridor toward a series of rooms that claimed to be the pediatric ward but had obviously been taken over by the coma patients. The colorful paintings of jungles and underwater scenes on the walls inside the rooms were the only thing left to give away what this place had been, only three months ago. 

Wasting a vague thought as to where the sick children had gone, Sam shrugged and almost crashed into Doctor Miller as he stopped outside a door and pointed at the last bed in a row of three. “There she is,” he told them, stepping back to let them enter.

“No quarantine?” Sam asked, as Dean boldly marched in.

“No. We checked for every known disease and a few I think we made up on the spot,” he smiled wryly. “Whatever this is, it’s not airborne or transmitted through contact.”

Dean stopped at the foot of Jane’s bed and for a minute, stared at her unblinkingly, taking in every detail of her face. Blonde hair, probably dyed, past her shoulders, slightly wavy. Her face was small, heart-shaped. Her nose slightly upturned in an impish rather than cute way. Full lips, chapped but pink. No other obvious identifying marks. She was short. Hard to tell how short, since she was lying down, but probably under five foot five. Her hands were dainty, but her nails short, though whether that was the nurses’ doing or her regular style was impossible to tell. Her ears were pierced but her jewelry had been removed.

“Does she have any tattoos? Scars? Anything that can help ID her?” Dean asked without turning around. 

The doctor looked a bit uncomfortable sharing those details but in the end he shrugged. “Several scars all over her body, none that a casual observer would notice. No tattoos, although it looks like she had one removed from her back several years ago. We could not make out its original design. She had no ID on her, nor anything else that could give a clue as to her identity. The only thing that might be of use was the necklace she wore.” 

He nodded for Dean to step aside and rounded her bed, opening the drawer of the small nightstand. He pulled out something small and silvery, dropping it into Dean’s upturned hand. Sam stepped closer to inspect it. It was a simple necklace with three charms dangling on it. The least notable was a somewhat crude cross made of something that was too dull to be silver. Then came a pentagram, one point up, designed for protection, and last was a tiny glass vial, only about as big as a thumbnail, maybe a bit slimmer and longer, filled with some sort of brownish powder.

“Wanna bet that cross is consecrated iron?” Dean murmured. His brother nodded. Pentagram of silver, cross of iron and some sort of spell in a vial. These weren’t simple charms of a girl with eccentric taste in jewelry. They were meant for protection. Against magic, creatures of various kinds, and other things that came out in the dark. 

“Protection charms,” Sam muttered in response.

“I beg your pardon?” Doctor Miller asked, overhearing their quiet exchange.

Both brothers jerked, looking at him with innocent expressions. “Nothing. Just wondering why anyone would wear a pentagram and a cross on the same necklace. Not exactly compatible, are they?”

At least not if you didn’t hunt monsters and demons for a living. Then the two different kinds of faith went together surprisingly well. 

Miller shrugged helplessly and took back the necklace, stowing it where he’d found it. 

+


	3. Chapter 3

+

**Two**

+

“So?” Sam asked, carefully probing his salad with a fork, “What do you think?”

“I have no idea,” Dean answered absently, transfixed by their waitress’s backside. 

“What is today? Check out my butt day?” Sam kicked his brother in the shin under the table, causing him to flinch and glare, breaking his concentration. By the time Dean recovered, the waitress was once again safely shielded from wandering eyes behind the counter.

He sighed and turned to his own burger, digging in with gusto and ignoring little brother’s scowl. Sometimes he wondered what Sam’s problem was. It wasn’t like he was going to take the waitress home. If he had sex with every woman he flirted with or checked out, he’d never get anything done. Life on the road was hard and fast and over quick and while Sam found escape in his books, Dean had no such release. He was a people person and so that’s what he did. He found people to talk to. Those girls he flirted with expected nothing of him, just like he expected nothing of them. It was simply a bit of a game, flirting to make yourself feel better, brighten the day. 

Somehow Sammy hadn’t gotten that memo yet, utterly convinced that his brother was a lecherous heartbreaker. It disappointed Dean sometimes that Sam looked at him and only saw the same shiny façade any stranger would see. Wasn’t Sammy supposed to see right through him?

Okay, Dean decided as he chewed on a fry, now he was being unfair. Sam did see more than your average Joe. Too much, sometimes. But when it came to some things, he was amazingly blind. Always had been. 

No matter. Job to do, world to save. “I wanna know more about Jane Doe. And we definitely gotta talk to those four people who’re awake. Maybe they do remember something and kept their mouths shut because it seems too freaky. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Sam nodded as he speared a cocktail tomato, almost sending it skidding across the table. “Alright. You want Jane Doe? I can do the victims.”

Usual way of splitting work. Sam was better at feigning compassion. Or rather, at showing it. Dean felt for those people, too, but he had no time to hold their hands while more people were in danger. Sam just put on that patented Sammy Winchester Cares expression and got anything he wanted in less time than it took Dean to formulate his questions.

“I’ll check any place she could have stayed, try to find out where her stuff went. Doc said she only had her purse with her when they brought her in. Think we should crack that spell charm? Figure out what kind of spell it is? Could be a lead.”

Sam thought about it for a moment before shaking his head. “The pentagram and cross are general protection. Last line of defense or something like that. The spell is probably something pretty generic, too. Nothing that can help us ID her. It’s not worth the risk of stealing it.”

“Alright. What about you?”

Sam checked the clock hanging on the wall over their heads and said, “High school lets out in an hour. I’ll try to catch Linda before her parents can regulate what she says and then check out the other three. Meet you back at the motel at sundown?”

“Yeah. Fine. Keep your cell on, though. If people drop randomly in this town, I don’t want you to drop off my radar, got it?”

Rolling his eyes and grinning in a way that meant he was humoring his big brother’s paranoid protective streak yet again, Sam nodded and polished off the last of his salad and drink before standing and taking off with a jaunty wave goodbye, leaving Dean to settle the bill for their late lunch with Cindy, the hot waitress. 

Dean swallowed the last of his burger, washed it down with coke and raised an eyebrow to himself. Maybe Sam did understand his flirting game a bit after all.

+

Sundown found Dean grumpy, still mostly clueless and aching for a nice, frosty bottle of beer. After checking the yellow pages he’d had the addresses of two Bed and Breakfast’s to check out, as well as a hotel and a sort of hostel. Apparently, a well-used hiking trail passed just half a mile from the city, bringing its fair share of tourists during the season. 

In none of those four places had anyone seen a short blonde from out of town. He’d asked the clerks, the maids and anyone else that had crossed his path. Jane hadn’t checked into any of those places.

All that was left now, after five hours of tiring smooth talking, was the very motel they were staying in and Dean didn’t have high hopes for this one. The girl was pretty, young, her clothes stored next to her bed had been neat and fairly new. She was the B&B kind of girl, not the ratty motel just off the highway kind of girl.

Nobody was, unless they had something to hide. Or hide from. But Jane hadn’t been hiding. She’d been all over town. Grocery shopping, asking for directions, eating in the diner. She wasn’t runnin’ from nothin’.

So, motel, last stop and then back to the room to find Sammy and drag him out for a beer and some pool. They were running low on cash after he’d spent the afternoon greasing people’s memory pointlessly.

+

“I hate logic,” Dean fairly snarled as soon as the door slammed shut behind him. 

Sam straightened in his seat, pushing his laptop aside. “Why? What’s going on?”

Grunting, the older Winchester threw his jacket on his bed and kicked out a chair to sit. “Nothing. You find anything?”

Knowing full well that nothing wasn’t actually _nothing_ , Sam nevertheless let it go. All he’d get if he pushed now was a ‘chick flick’ comment and some crap joke about watching too much daytime TV. Dean would either talk or he’d keep everything bottled up inside until he hit breaking point and then talked. 

Sam closed his computer and got two beers out of the mini fridge in the corner, handing one to Dean before popping his own and taking a sip. “Actually, I got nothing. Talked to all four of the victims. They remember going to sleep and waking up, surprised as hell to be in the hospital. They don’t even remember sleeping very long, or anything.”

“Could be a spell to make them forget?”

“Could be,” Sam admitted, playing with his bottle, “But I managed to throw salt on one of them.”

Dean cracked a smile at the thought of Sammy somehow managing to land salt – probably table salt – lookie what I got, how did that happen, I’m so sorry – on some hapless person without getting yelled out of the house under the threat of someone calling the cops. 

He pointed at him with his beer and reminded him, “If the spell’s strong enough, salt won’t break it.”

“No. But it would cause some kind of reaction. There was nothing.” Grimacing at his own failure to turn up useful information, Sam downed half his beer and asked, “What about you? Find something?”

Dean gave a single shake of his head, setting down his beer. “I got diddly-squat. Checked two B&B’s, the hotel and even the hostel. Nothing. Then I went to talk to the motel clerk. Guess where Jane was living?”

“Where?”

“Two doors down from us. Room number ten.”

“Wanna check it out?” 

He shrugged. “Dude, she fell into a coma two months ago. They probably rented the room out half a dozen times since then. But I did find out one interesting detail.”

“Yeah?”

“Yep. Dear Jane was found by the maid, who called the ambulance and then finished her shift, praying under her breath the entire time. Then she quit and left town the very same day.”

“So she saw something in there that freaked her out. Any idea what it was?”

“Manager says she spent over an hour in Jane’s room before calling 911.”

Surprised, Sam cocked his head to one side. “So she was cleaning in there? Why would she do that?”

“Maybe there was something in that room that she thought no-one should see?”

“Like…,” Sam wagered, “Maybe, a summoning circle?”

Dean grinned, happy to see his brother had come to the same conclusion he had. “Maybe. Unfortunately, Miss Maid’s Green Card might have been a bit out of date. She left no forwarding address, nothing. No way to find and ask her.”

“Great. Another dead end.” Sam finished off his beer, shaking his head. It’d been a long time since they’d had a hunt as complicated as this. Or maybe they’d gotten spoiled hunting after rampaging demons that left behind clues and trails a blind three-year-old could have followed, no problem. 

Either way, this whole thing was starting to give him a headache. He absently turned down Dean’s suggestion to find a bar and relax, asking his brother to bring him back something to eat instead. He’d put together everything they knew, look it over one more time for something obvious they’d missed and then call Bobby and ask for his help. After all, the man had more books at his disposal, more experience, _and_ he was the one who’d sent them this way in the first place. So there.

And then he’d grab some pain killers, climb into bed and hopefully dream of anything but eighteen comatose people in Hollow Springs, Colorado.

+

After twenty-three years on the road with a family dedicated to hunting the things that went bump in the night, Sam should have known better than to hope. 

Despite not having any recollection of falling asleep, he distinctly knew that this was a dream. The fact that he was standing on a sunny beach, toes digging into the sand, feeling the warmth of the sun and the salty ocean spray on his face, were kind of a dead giveaway, considering that he knew he had last been in a motel room in Colorado. Which was probably as far from the sea as you could get while still remaining within the borders of the United States.

It was a good dream, calm in the middle of all the shit going on in the waking world. Here, there was no time slipping through his fingers as Dean irreversibly inched closer to his own grave. There was no dead father he had anything to prove to, no dead mother and Jess who would have wanted better for him. No-one that needed saving, nothing that needed killing and damn sure no-one expecting him to mutate into some sort of avenging demon king and lead the armies of hell in their war against heaven.

No expectations. His dreams were pretty much the only place where Sam had ever been free of them. 

Somewhere behind him, a soft, female voice said, “I’m sorry.”

Then the lights clicked out and the beach disappeared from right under his feet. Sam was pretty sure that this was where the should-have-known-better-than-to-wish part came into play.

He spun on his heel in the absolute darkness and found nothing. No-one, nothing, no anything at all. He was alone in complete darkness. Alright, Sam told himself. It was dark. Big deal. He spent half of his life in dark places. His night vision was probably as good as an owl’s. But there was that little detail where he couldn’t _feel_ any limit to the space around him and that made him feel a bit wonky. Like someone had pulled the rug from under him and instead of landing on his ass, he kept floating in midair. 

There was nothing around him, no walls he could feel, no impression of limited space. Just… darkness. And even knowing that he was still asleep, it scared him.

There was a scream. 

Sam whirled around in the direction of the sound in time to see a sliver of white and pink, a girl with pink hair, screaming as a knife came flashing through the dark and buried itself inside of her. Less than a second and she was gone. He didn’t even have time to react. To try to help her. But… he was dreaming, wasn’t he? 

Whose dream was this?

Another scream. Again, he whirled around. A redheaded woman, laughing until a hammer came down and smashed into her face. Gone again.

The next scene was longer, more than a second this time, a naked man in white war paint, spear in hand until a machete buried itself in his stomach, gutting him.

Okay, this was getting freaky. A slideshow of people dying? He got enough of that in real life. More and more scenes arose from the dark, lasting no longer than the blink of an eye, a scream and then gone again. But those snippets, those split-second deaths burned themselves into Sam’s memory just like his visions once had. He’d never get rid of them as long as he lived. 

A woman, elderly, at least forty, wearing an old fashioned hoop dress, all brocade and ruffles. A man shot her point blank in the face with a musket. She didn’t have time to so much as gurgle before she died. 

A little girl, a child really, falling, falling, falling, off a bridge and into darkness.

“Why the hell are you showing me this?” he yelled into the dark, fed up and freaked out. Whoever controlled this dream, it wasn’t him anymore. And he had no weapons, no backup, no _Dean_ around to save him. No ground under his feet, nothing to cling to, nothing he could see, but those flashes of death that crept closer and closer.

He balled his fists, taking deep breaths, trying to remain calm. It was an age old trick. Breathe and try to figure out what Dean would do. 

A flicker of light in the corner of his eye, he spun around as fast as he could, but he was too slow. 

Only this time, the flicker came back.

It was a woman.

Small, blonde, flickering in and out of existence like a picture on a TV set with bad reception. Like a ghost in a TV. The girl from the hospital. Jane Doe.

She flickered again and then steadied for a moment. “Sorry,” she said and Sam realized she was the one who’d spoken before turning off his beach. “I’m trying to-“

She was gone. He was alone in the dark for a second then she was back, brighter than before. “- them away from you. But I can’t hold them all back.”

“Are you real?” 

He was sure she nodded but she flickered again in mid motion so he couldn’t be sure. “Then what are you doing in my dream? You’re brain dead.”

He could have sworn she looked insulted at that. “Tried to get to your brother –“ flicker, “- so much brighter. But he won’t go to sleep and I don’t –“ flicker “- much time. Listen.”

She took a step forward and Sam automatically backed up. She stopped immediately, hands loose at her sides, palms out. Harmless. Defenseless. Unarmed. The fact remained that she had invaded his dream and was showing him people’s deaths.

“How are you here?”

She shook her head but sighed as if realizing he needed to know at all costs. He couldn’t believe she was real unless he knew how. Didn’t work that way. “I’m borrowing its powers for a bit. Won’t work long, so _please_ listen.”

Her eyes grew impossibly wide suddenly as she whirled around to face something he could neither hear nor see. Her face was a study in apprehension, frustration and weariness. Not fear though, Sam noticed. She wasn’t afraid. Actually, she looked a bit pissed off.

“It’s noticed me.” She turned back to him, hands raised imploringly but not coming closer. “No time, Sam.” 

Around them, the screams and flickering death scenes started up again. “You gotta find my car.”

She flickered and for a moment Sam was sure he could hear water rushing in the background. No, not water. A roar. A roar of a beast as big as the world. 

“My car,” Jane wheezed, appearing again, “You’ll find answers. Now go!” At the last word she suddenly appeared in his personal space and shoved him with both hands, hard, throwing him backwards.

He landed, gasping like a fish, stomach rolling, images of dozens of people dying dancing before his eyes, in his bed in his motel room in Colorado. Dean looked up from the laptop, looking surprised as his brother jack-knifed up in bed.

“Sammy…” he started, but Sam couldn’t hear him because he tumbled off the bed in a flurry of limbs and sheets and made it to the trash can in the corner just in time to puke up everything he had ever eaten. 

He gagged and retched as his head tried to explode from the pressure that was pounding on his brain and the images that wouldn’t fade. A warm hand was on his back suddenly, between his shoulder blades, not moving, just staying there. Solid. Real. Dean. 

He focused on that, centered his whole being around that hand and managed to calm his heaving stomach, to stuff the images into some far corner of his mind and force his muscles, one by one, to relax. Slowly, his white-knuckled grip on the trash can loosened.

“Man, what the hell?” Dean asked, keeping his voice low and calm. They’d had a few episodes like this before, when Sam had still gotten his visions. But not since Yellow Eyes was dead. Not since then, damn it. A whole month without and fuck it all, here he was, feeling more wretched than he ever had. 

“Dream,” Sam managed, pushing the trash can with the sad remains of his lunch away and shuffling backwards to lean against the bed frame. Dean’s hand left him and he floundered for a moment, readjusting to existing without his brother’s touch. By the time he dared open his eyes again, Dean slid down next to him, pressing a wet towel into his hand. 

Sam wiped his face, accepted the glass of water to wash away the taste of vomit and then closed his eyes again, allowing himself, just for a bit, to lean into Dean’s side. And Dean, being Dean called him a girl and shuffled closer, letting his brother lean on him. 

“Must’a been a hell of a dream.”

Sam snorted and regretted it immediately, wincing. Dean dug blindly in the bedside drawer for a moment before coming up with a bottle of painkillers. He handed his brother three without hesitation, knowing that all Winchester men had long since built up a ridiculous immunity to all kinds of painkillers.

Sam gulped them down obediently and said, very carefully, “I don’t think it actually was a dream. The girl from the hospital was there. Jane Doe.”

“Damn, Sammy,” Dean said in his best _score!_ tone of voice. Sam somehow found the energy to punch him in the thigh before explaining all that he’d seen. Well, most of it. He glossed over the death scenes. No use in making Dean race to the hospital and kill a comatose girl for putting bad images into his little brother’s head. 

That sounded dirty. Plus, they’d have a hell of a time trying to explain in to the authorities.

+


	4. Chapter 4

+

**Three**

+

It was three in the morning by the time Dean decided that he had squeezed all available information out of his dizzy, disoriented brother. He was tempted to be pissed at the little bitch that had done this to Sammy, but in the end, information won over emotion.

They knew about five times as much now as they had before Sam’s dreamscape encounter – if they could trust what Sam had to say. Which, judging by the certainty that tinged his words, they could. Sam was convinced this girl was for real and not some whacked out demon hijacking his dreams. So, they were going to believe her because Sam believed her and that meant Dean did, too. 

As Dean watched Sam stumble back to bed, wrung out and already more than half asleep, he pulled out Dad’s journal that had long since become their own and noted down all the new information they had.

They were hunting something that controlled dreams, apparently. Jane said she was borrowing the thing’s power. So there was that, too. Also, their assumption that Jane was involved in the whole thing had been right. It seemed like this thing had her trapped, somehow. Maybe that was why her symptoms were different from others’. Because this thing was inside of her, or attached to her or something. 

If the thing they were hunting – they really needed to give it a name because ‘thing’ was becoming kind of lame – was actually possessing her body, then they could be sure it wasn’t a demon of the standard garden variety. The chick had been hooked up to IVs for two month and those things contained salt. Not a lot, really, but Dean had once emptied a bag full of the stuff on a demon’s head and it had caused a reaction not unlike hay fever. Since the comatose girl wasn’t sneezing, showing any signs of rash or otherwise looking uncomfortable - no demon. It was something at least.

Not a demon. Messes with dreams. That only left… well, several hundred possibilities, max. But no more than that. Dean sighed, chucked the pen on the table and decided that Bobby so owed them for this hunt. Actually, he was tempted to call the man right now just to know he’d made him stumble out of bed. But he wasn’t that petty. Most of the time.

Shaking his head, he shucked his jeans and t-shirt, slipping into bed. He was beat. Tomorrow, first thing, they’d go looking for the chick’s car and hopefully find a few more answers. Until then, Sammy had the right idea.

Sleep.

Dean’s last thoughts before dropping off were that he hoped he wouldn’t get a visit by the dream-walking Jane Creepy and what the hell she’d been talking about when she’d said he was _brighter_ than Sam.

+

Nothing got the day going like a spot of B & E just after breakfast. 

At least that seemed to be Dean’s motto of the day and Sam, still stumbling through the fog of a stubborn headache and the last wisps of vivid dream-memory from the night before, followed his brother on autopilot. 

It was his default setting whenever all his higher brain functions ceased due to some reason. Pain. Exhaustion. Confusion. Anger. Through all those things he could keep his body moving, as long as he had Dean within his sights. One step after the other and don’t lose that back, that dark blond hair, that leather jacket. Years and years ago, like a duckling, he had imprinted on his primary care giver but unlike with birds, his imprinting didn’t seem to have faded with adulthood. Quite the opposite actually. It had never been as strong as it was these days.

So, musing about ducklings, his fate as his brother’s shadow, and the world in general, Sam followed the other man back to their motel and then to the room two doors down from theirs where Dean dug his faithful lock picks out of his jacket and went to work without the slightest sign of guilt or discomfort. 

The trick with doing illegal things in broad daylight and getting away with them was simply to look like you belonged right here, doing right that. If you looked guilty, people smelled it from a mile away. If you didn’t…. Sam had lost count of all the shit he and various members of his family had pulled over the years without anyone so much as frowning at them.

Within seconds Dean had the lock cowed and they stepped inside, quickly closing the door behind them. Jane Doe’s room. 

Dean figured that, if they were looking for information on her, this was as good a place to start as any. Besides, they had no idea how to look for her car and the hospital would be of no help, since they didn’t actually have a warrant. 

Without much fanfare, one of them went to check the bathroom while the other inspected the beds and the drawer in the far corner of the room. As predicted the day before, there was no trace of anything to be found in the room. 

Jane had been gone for two months and so was everything she might have brought into this room with her. Except, Sam thought, as he pushed the dark greenish curtain aside to peek into the parking lot, maybe not everything. 

Standing there, in the parking space for room number ten was a black mustang that looked like it had been there for a while. The windshield was covered in leaves, dirt was gathering around the wheels. All in all, the youngest Winchester decided, cocking his head to one side, the car kind of looked like it had been standing there for roughly two months.

Feeling a rush of energy at the possibility that they were actually having a streak of luck for once, Sam called out a quick, “Be right back,” and took off toward the motel’s office.

“Hey,” he asked the clerk as soon as he stepped in the door, “That mustang out there, does that belong to the Jane Doe at the hospital?”

The clerk, a pimply guy of about twenty-five made a bad attempt at hiding his _Penthouse_ under the counter and cleared his throat. “Uh-um. Yeah. I keep calling the sheriff’s office, asking them to move that thing, but so far, no-one’s come. Townspeople don’t like this place very much. Say it ‘sullies their picturesque town’. As if those hiking health nuts ever make it to this side of town. ‘Sides, where else would folks go if not here? Not to say you couldn’t go to the hotel just as fine, it’s just that, you know…”

Sam blinked and tuned out the monologue, mentally doing the jig. It looked as if, after yesterday’s research failure and last night’s migraine inducing nightmare, someone was smiling down on them today. They hadn’t even started looking for the car yet and Sam had already found it. Ha! Two points for him. Take that, Dean!

He nodded vaguely in the clerk’s direction - not that the man needed any encouragement, seeing as how he was still ranting - and turned on his heel, marching back across the parking lot to lean against the Mustang’s hood, arms crossed, waiting for his brother to finish his inspection of the empty room.

He came out five minutes later, grumbling about wasted time as he locked the door again. He turned to Sam with a _where’d you run off to_ glare and said, “Come on.”

Sam grinned, patted the hood of the car and asked, “You know what this is?”

Dean stopped, hands in his pockets, looking at him funny. “Yeah. It’s a ‘75 Mustang. So what?”

His brother grinned, “I just checked at the office. It’s Jane Doe’s car.”

Dean’s jaw dropped. “No way, man. We don’t get that lucky.”

“Apparently, just this once, we do. So, the locks?”

+

Dean looked at him like he just cancelled Christmas when he suggested picking the locks on the car. Apparently, picking the locks on motel rooms, houses, offices and even kindergartens (don’t ask) was okay. But picking the locks on a classic car was sacrilege worthy of whacking your brother upside the head for even thinking it.

Thus, half an hour later found them back at the hospital where Dean asked Doctor Miller a slew of completely random and redundant questions while Sam dimpled his way past the nurses and into Jane’s room to search her purse, necessitated by the lack of any search warrant, real or fake.

He found a tiny beaded thing in the nightstand, barely big enough to hold a wad of cash, a cell phone with a dead battery, an assortment of female necessities, a pocket knife, chopsticks – what the hell - and – jackpot – car keys.

Putting everything but the keys back where he found it Sam slipped out of the room, pretending to take notes on the small pad he kept handy for playing police officer. He managed to get a hold of a nurse in a pink cardigan and asked, “Did you try her cell phone when she came in?”

The nurse – Lisa, her nametag said – shook her head. “It was turned off already. There’s nothing we could do. The Sheriff put out her description of course but as long as no-one’s missing her….” She shrugged, looking at the door leading to Jane Doe’s room sadly.

Sam nodded understandingly and excused himself, keys jingling in his pocket. He left the hospital, sitting on the curb by the Impala as he waited for Dean to finish with his distraction and get a move on. The faster they found whatever clue was in that Mustang, the faster they might get somewhere with the job.

Dean arrived five minutes later with a questioning look on his face. Sam smirked and drew the keys from his pocket, waving them. “So it really is her car,” Dean remarked, sounding like he hadn’t believed it before.

“You have that much trouble believing that we got lucky just once without breaking our backs for it?” Sam inquired as he climbed in the car.

“Nah,” his brother waved him off. “Just didn’t believe a chick like her would actually drive a car like that. Gotta admit, she looks more like the SUV type. Or Volvo maybe.”

Sam snorted, shaking his head. In Dean Speak, ‘Volvo’ was synonymous with ‘escapee from suburban hell’, which was synonymous with ‘evil’. “Dean, you don’t know this woman. You’ve seen her once, lying in bed, unconscious.”

He interrupted himself as a thought occurred. “Which is actually like you meet most women, but still. You don’t know her. Hell, she might be a female version of you and you wouldn’t know.”

Dean pulled the car on the road with a small lurch that had nothing to do with his driving skills and everything with the dark look he was throwing his dear baby brother. “Okay, first of all, I don’t do unconscious women, okay? Participation is totally a must.” He ignored Sam’s grimace. “And secondly, dude, there is no female version of me. I’m totally and utterly unique!”

“Ri-ight.”

+

The seats yielded nothing in the way of information. Clothes, a half full bottle of water, dirty shoes in the backseat, a couple of well-read paperbacks. The usual paraphernalia of someone who’d been on the road for a while. The only papers in the glove compartment were made out to an Alexandra Lavelle. 

They would have believed that to be Jane Doe’s name, if they hadn’t found two fake IDs right there, too, one belonging to a Mary Connors the other to a Julia Welt. Obviously, Jane got along with legal and honest about as well as the Winchester clan did. Which was to say, not at all. Dean made a face and shrugged, never one to mind petty criminals and a good con much. Sam, on the other hand, frowned and wondered just who their Jane Doe was and what she did for a living. 

Yeah, sure, they had about ten times as many fake IDs in the glove compartment, but they used them to help people, to do good. What did Jane use them for?

After convincing Dean that no, they didn’t need to inspect Jane’s clothes – read: lingerie - for any suspicious items, Sam popped the trunk of the car and immediately noticed something. “Does this trunk seem small to you?”

Dean, standing next to him, head tilted, eyes narrowed, didn’t answer. Instead he bent forward and ran his fingers along the left side of the trunk for a moment. He grinned as they caught on something and pushed the fake bottom of the trunk up a bit to sneak a peek under it.

“Crap,” he said quite clearly and opened the secret compartment all the way to show Sam what it contained. 

Knives. Swords. Daggers. A crossbow. Throwing stars. A stack of old, leather bound books. Bottles of holy water. A pile of crucifixes in various sizes. Salt. 

“Jane Doe is a hunter.” It explained the fake IDs, the lack of personal stuff in her purse, the chopsticks – pointy and made of wood, killed lots of things - even how there’d been nothing in her room. Hunters were paranoid and she’d probably been aiming for a quick getaway before something had gone horribly wrong.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Dean said absently, fishing a sheathed short sword out of the trunk to prop up the fake bottom. Sam couldn’t do much more than stare stupidly at the arsenal in front of him. The Impala’s trunk was darn impressive. Their dad’s truck had been better. But this… this was the most deadly trunk Sam had seen in his entire life, and he’d seen a few. 

Sure, there was only one gun at the very back of the trunk and the whole collection of weapons seemed to be designed for close combat rather than the classic Winchester style, but the fact remained that both brothers were in silent awe. 

And all this was supposed to belong to five foot nothing Jane Doe? She didn’t look like she could lift some of those swords. Dean reached for the set of throwing stars, grinning like a kid. He’d always had an unhealthy fixation on those things but Dad had never allowed him any because he said they were useless on a real hunt. 

He picked up the open box they were stored in and revealed another box underneath. It was made of wood, inlaid with various protection spells and was the only thing in the car that had a lock of its own. 

Naturally, they broke it. 

“Jackpot,” Sam breathed as he pulled the box from Dean’s grip and opened it to find various odds and end and – the prize – a journal. He pulled it out and flipped it open somewhere in the middle, satisfied to find newspaper clippings and a rough sketch of some sort of amulet. This was a hunting journal. 

He closed the box and put it back where they had found it, as Dean gave the arsenal one last longing look and closed and relocked the trunk with more care than he had taken in opening it. Before, Jane Doe had been a victim with a connection to the bad guy. Now she was a fellow hunter in need of aid.

In Dean’s mind, that changed everything. And if Sam was honest, it did for him, too. Hunters were con artists and liars, regular criminals and seldom upstanding members of any society. But they did have a code of honor, screwed up as it was. And that code said never leave behind one of your own. Jane was a hunter. Jane needed help. Jane would get help, even if they had to move heaven and hell to do it. That was the way they were raised.

Dean pocketed the Mustang’s keys, giving the car one last, fond pat as they turned toward their room. Sam was already leafing through the journal.

“Let’s hope Jane wrote about what she was hunting.”

+


	5. Chapter 5

+

**Four**

+

It figured that a female hunter’s journal would be more along the lines of _Dear Diary_ , Dean griped and threw the book at his brother.

“ _4/14/05_

_Xander gave me this thing as a going away present._

_Said I have to keep my own record, now that I’m out on my own. I guess it was also a message for the others. Xander and Faith are backing me with this and so is Robin, I guess. He still hates me for reminding him that his mother chose this life over him but hey, not my fault. He gets it now. Being married to Faith will do that to a guy._

_The others are angry with me. They say I’m throwing away my life. I tried explaining it to them but they don’t get it. Xander wouldn’t have either before Anya. I took a whole year off from slaying, helping them build their new lives and taking a vacation but I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I’ve been living this life for too long to rot behind a desk. Normal isn’t in the cards for me anymore, if it ever was. Dates and men and shopping? Been there, done that, trashed the t-shirt. And the guy in it. At least while I’m slaying I’m doing something useful._

_‘Sides, it’s not like I have a lot of career options here. Or a life to go back to. All I have is hunting and my friends. And the way things look right now, all I’ve got is hunting. Dawn isn’t even speaking to me, neither is Wills. Xan and Faith are both wrapped up in their own lives and, in Xan’s case, he’s not even on this continent._

_Just good ol’ me, my shiny new car and tons of demon ass to kick._ ”

Sam snorted as he finished reading the first entry in Jane’s journal out loud. He rolled over so he was lying on his back, looking at Dean upside down on the other bed. “Dude,” he drawled, “This chick _is_ a female version of you.”

Dean glared and said nothing, causing Sam to sit up, leaning forward. “Come on. Admit it. She’s all about the hunt and to hell with normal. ‘Normal’s not in the cards for us’, how many times have you told me that, Dean?”

Rolling his eyes, the older of the two reached for the journal and started leafing through it. After a minute or two he gave a triumphant cry, holding up one hand for Sam to be silent and listen.

“Here says: _Just had a vision. Faith and her baby in danger. Gotta run._ You hear that, Sammy? She has _visions_. Now who’s a female version of who?”

He smirked, waving the journal in his brother’s face, certain of victory. Sam on the other hand frowned. Jane was a psychic? Like him? Could it be that she was one of the chosen kids as well? But no. She seemed roughly Sam’s age. If she were like him, she’d have been at Cold Oak. He pushed the thought aside, trying to take back the tattered journal. Dean jerked it out of his reach, grinning.

“Drop it, man,” Sam ordered. “She said this Faith girl was her friend. I wanna know if she’s alright.”

With an eye roll and a grumbled comment about having a girl for a brother, Dean turned the page, dramatically cleared his throat and read, “ _Wow. Last minute rescue. Faith’s safe from the demon cult that thought cutting her baby out of her stomach for some freaky ass ritual was a good idea. She took three of them down before they got her but she didn’t stand a chance. Total carnage. She says she would have gotten free eventually and squished them all with her whale of a body. I’m just glad I got there in time. Robin flew in about an hour ago, just in time to meet his daughter because, of course, once the demons were all dead, Faith just had to go into labor, right there, knee deep in guts and blood._ ”

Dean grimaced at the image but Sam was positive it was the labor part that was freaking him out, not the blood and guts. Go figure. 

“ _Little Josie Anne is a healthy, squealing bundle of cuteness and Faith keeps calling me ‘Auntie’. I might have to kill her as soon as she’s back on her feet. Also, I totally forbade her from naming that poor worm after me but does she ever listen? No. Josie Anne was supposed to be a Josie Nichole but Mommy said that demon ass kicking aunts who save your life take precedence over demon ass kicking dead grandmas. Surprisingly, Robin agrees so I guess all’s well that ends well. I’ll stick around until Faith is back in shape and then go south. There’s something fishy going on in New Mexico and I wanna look-see._

“See? The little pipsqueak is perfectly fine, as is Mommy. With added bonus of figuring out Jane’s name.”

Dean held up the journal with one hand, gesturing at it with the other. “Anne,” he said gravely, “Meet Sam. Sam, meet Anne.” 

This time it was Sam who rolled his eyes and lunged for the journal. And through the unfair advantage of about four inches he actually got it, flipping through it until he found the last entries, all dated very close together. Anne’s last hunt. Or, to be exact, Anne’s current hunt. It wasn’t over yet. 

He lay back down, journal propped open on his chest and waited until Dean held still to start reading again.

“ _This is a tricky one. I’ve been here two days and I haven’t figured out what exactly this thing is. Four people fell into a coma and didn’t wake up again. I thought it was some sort of demon that drained a person’s life force, but that’s not it. I know how someone looks with their life force drained and these people are perfectly healthy, according to the good doctor’s files that I found during my visit to the hospital last night. I figure it’s got something to do with taking people’s souls, or probably part of them. Without a soul, a body simply dies, so some remainder of the people still has to hang around for the bodies to survive. I’ll try a few spells and shake a few brains into action tonight, see what I can turn up._

“There’s an added note in the margins,” Sam suddenly interrupted himself, turning the book sideways to read it. “ _I noticed that the nights around here are dead silent. No animal sounds at all. Not even a dog barking. Nothing. Last time I saw something like this was in Sunnydale. Whatever this is, it’s old. I can feel it echo in my head._ ”

“Okay. Wow. ‘I can feel it echo in my head’? This chick is seriously creepy,” Dean remarked, shifting on his bed. 

Sam sat up again, shrugging and frowning. “I don’t know. She had this vision about her friend, right? So say she’s psychic. Maybe she was getting vibes off that thing.”

“Are you?”

“What?”

“Getting any vibes?” Dean repeated gruffly, sounding like he always did when it came to Sam’s more demon-y aspects.

“I haven’t done any of that stuff since Wyoming and you know it, bro.”

Running a hand through his hair, the older man stood, making his way to the bathroom door. Hand on the knob, he stopped and said without turning around, “You had a headache last night before you went to bed.”

Then he stepped into the small bathroom, closing the door and leaving Sam to gape at empty space, trying to remember how his headache had felt. Automatically his hand came up to rub at one temple and he froze in mid-motion. He was having a headache right now, wasn’t he?

A low level hum at the back of his skull that he had attributed to his midnight puking session. But… post-vomiting headaches didn’t really feel like this, did they?

“Shit,” he said, quiet and heartfelt. At least they knew that Jane – Anne – wasn’t a fraud. That was something, right?

+

When Dean came out of the bathroom, the levity of the morning had officially been replaced by the usual hunting mood. They had spent the morning goofing around because they’d had a lucky break with the car, possibly the first since before Cold Oak and they had both needed it. Had needed the small reminder that the whole universe did not hate them. 

But now, with Sam worrying about the slow throb of his headache and Dean eager to finally tackle this job, the fun was over. Dean grabbed their own journal from the table and sat down, pen poised, ready to take notes as his brother read the other hunter’s revelations to him. 

“Next entry starts like this,” Sam picked up the thread of Anne’s journal, “ _I hate it when I’m right. Really. Hate it. It’s old, this thing. Old as shit and it’s not one of the run of the mill baddies. It’s a sort of… well, my source calls it a Walking Nightmare. Lore goes like this:_ ”

Sam skimmed ahead in the dense, loopy handwriting and felt a frown cutting lines in his face as he cursed softly under his breath. “This is not good. _Lore goes like this: A couple eons ago, a dream, a nightmare, managed to come to life. To become an actual, sentient entity. No idea how and I don’t care. If the dead can come to life, then so can dreams. This thing started devouring other dreams to strengthen itself and has ever since. By now, it’s probably eaten millions of dreams. In other words, it’s a thing literally made of nightmares._

“ _Which totally confirms my soul sucking theory. We need souls to dream. So when the Nightmare sucks out a person’s dreams, it takes part of their soul. Enough to leave them in a coma, not enough to kill them. I have no idea why this thing showed up here, now. The last recorded case was four hundred years ago in Asia and as far as I can tell, it usually took only one or two people before moving on. Something’s different this time. And I have no idea how to fight this thing._ ”

There was a beat of silence as both Winchesters let the meaning of what Sam had just read sink in. This thing was thousands of years old and living off parts of people’s souls. 

“Dude,” Dean said slowly, “We are so far out of our usual league, it’s not even funny.”

Sam, feeling his headache growing worse, decided to forego the doomsday speech and get directly to the point. “The next ten or so pages are filled with equations and drawings of all sorts of spells and rituals, from a Devil’s Trap to something that looks like Sumerian. I think Anne was trying to figure out a way to trap this Nightmare because she didn’t know how to kill it. So if we figure out her notes on this…”

He trailed off, leaving his sentence open. Dean looked up from his own writing and ran a hand over his face. “Yeah. Sure. But something went wrong, didn’t it? Last night you said she told you she was using its powers. And she entered your dreams. Pulled you into hers, whatever. So we can assume that whatever she did to trap it, actually pulled the thing right into her body.”

“You mean she’s the vessel of her own spell?”

A shrug. “Maybe. We know she pulled the thing away from those four people. They’re awake, right? So she managed to attack it. That’s where things went wrong. Maybe pulling this Nightmare into herself was the only thing she could do.”

“You mean she willingly became a host for this… creature?” Sam’s eyebrows just about hit his hairline as Dean shrugged again.

“If you had the choice between losing it and putting it where it can’t hurt anyone, wouldn’t you?”

Dean would. In a heartbeat. He would take some monster into his body, lock them both away in his subconscious and try to fight it there, if only it kept someone else safe. It was the kind of shit he did. That and selling his soul for his idiot of a brother who turned his back on a desperate man with a knife. One of these days they would sit down, or rather, Sam would sit on Dean, and have a very long conversation about self-esteem and throwing your life away for every passing cause. 

Until then, “But it’s still hurting people. More than ever, if Anne’s research is right. Thirteen people since she trapped it.”

Another shrug. “It’s trying to break free. Take control of her maybe. It needs energy for that.”

Grimacing because they were pretty far out there by now with their theory, Sam still nodded. “Okay. But how do we pull it out of her? Anne’s way didn’t work.”

“That,” Dean stated, flinging down his pen, “Is the million dollar question. It’s not corporeal, it’s not a demon, and it’s not a spirit. How do you trap something like that, Sammy?”

“Well,” waving Anne’s journal, “she tried combining different rituals, as far as I can see. She was working off the idea that it’s sort of like a poltergeist.”

“You mean it’s an accumulation of what, dream energy? Like a poltergeist is an accumulation of negative energy?”

“Yeah. Only a whole lot worse than thrown steak knives and china. And did you just seriously use a five syllable word?”

Eloquently, Dean raised a single digit and shoved it under his baby brother’s nose. “Up yours,” he growled without real heat. 

Education was an ongoing subject of teasing for both of them. Dean ribbed Sam for his wimpy college education and Sam picked on Dean for his apparent lack of education. All the while both were perfectly aware that Sam had pretty much the same street smarts as his brother, while Dean could have easily gone to college, too, if he’d ever had any interest whatsoever in anything but cars, women and the hunt. Not in that order. 

Sam made a mock grab for the finger before dropping his smile and sighing. “I don’t understand enough of these theories to work out what Anne did. We gotta send this to Bobby and wait for his input.”

Dean groaned. Bobby knew more about the supernatural than a dozen hunters together and he’d spent the past thirty years gathering any and all books on lore, myths and magic that money, and a few other less legal actions, could buy. If anyone could figure out a), what Anne had done and b), what she had done wrong, it was Bobby. But even Bobby needed time for something like this. Which meant waiting. Dean _loathed_ waiting.

“This sucks.” 

Sam snorted. “Yeah? You don’t have to put up with yourself when you’re bored. I do.”

Then he went to dig through the Impala’s trunk for their cheap digital camera so he could send Bobby pictures of Anne’s mad professor scribblings, leaving Dean alone in their room.

He yawned. Between his own fucked up sleeping patterns and Sam’s digestive pyrotechnics, he had only gotten a little over four hours of sleep the night before. He’d let Sammy bring Bobby up to speed and catch a little shut eye before dinner. Leaving the journal on the table next to Anne’s, he tiredly stumbled toward his bed, sitting down hard. He stripped off his jeans and boots and fell asleep before Sam got back, putting to good use twenty years of practice at sleeping anywhere and at any time. 

+

By the time Sam got back from his phone conversation with Bobby, telling the man that he had an e-mail and what was going on, Dean was fast asleep and happily snoring the afternoon away, and Sam didn’t have the heart to wake him. Usually, he was the one plagued by insomnia and messed up sleeping patterns but lately, whenever he woke in the night, Dean was almost always awake already. He didn’t know if something was keeping his brother awake or if he didn’t want to sleep. Maybe he thought he was wasting time, now that he had less than a year left. 

Maybe it was nightmares. However, Winchester tradition said they would not talk about the problem before it grew claws and a tail and tried to eat them, so Sam would likely never find out. But he could let Dean get in a few hours of sleep while they were at an impasse with their research anyway.

So he jotted down a quick note to tell his paranoid big brother where he was, grabbed his wallet and cell phone, tucked his favorite gun into his waistband, and closed the door as quietly as he could behind himself. If Bobby figured something out today, they’d probably be working most of the night, so snacks wouldn’t go amiss. Besides, they were running low on M&Ms and without them to pacify Dean, Sam would probably kill his sibling. 

He set out on foot, enjoying the chance to stretch his legs without any sort of monster hot on his heels, walking vaguely toward town. He was positive that he’d seen a small corner store only about fifteen minutes from the motel and, yes, he had been right.

The Mom and Pop store had once probably been at the very edge of town but rows upon rows of neat little houses had swallowed it up. Sam meandered down the sidewalk toward it, occasionally nodding toward people in their front yards. Then he jogged up the three steps leading to the store’s entrance and frowned when he saw it was dark inside. No lights, no people. The sign was flipped on _Closed_ as well. He frowned and tried the door nonetheless because that’s what people do when confronted with closed doors. Besides, he was hungry and had no idea where the next store was.

“Oh dear, you won’t have any luck there,” a voice offered behind him and he turned to find himself face to… well, thin air actually, with a tiny old woman in a track suit of ethereal green, who seemed to stand only roughly four feet above the ground.

The boyish grin was automatic but then twenty years of training kicked in and told his brain to gather any and all available information to take home to the puzzle that was the current case. He dimpled at her and asked, “Thanks, ma’am. But why’s the store closed? I’m sure it was open yesterday.”

Conspiratorially, the old woman stepped closer, face gleaming with the joy of sharing gossip with an unsuspecting stranger. Sam sincerely hoped he hadn’t just signed up for a long and involved tale about the torrent affairs and dirty secrets of suburbia. “Haven’t you heard? Dear Marge and Billy, her husband, they both caught it.”

“Caught what?”

She licked her lips, pursed them and then answered slowly, “Well, that _disease_ that’s going around.”

Sam’s eyebrows hit hitherto unknown heights, “You’re saying they fell into a coma? Both of them?”

“Yes. Last night. I saw it today, when the ambulance picked them up. Poor dears.”

Sam momentarily froze and, to cover it up, let his mouth run on, “Do you know where I can find another store? I’m all out of practically everything.”

The woman nodded and started rattling off directions, which he noted with a small portion of his brain while the rest was blinking bright red. The Nightmare had started out taking one person every nine to ten days. It had sped up until it took one every other night. Now, it seemed, it had taken two people in one night. 

That was bad. It was very, very bad. Because it meant that they were running the hell out of time. 

Without hearing a word of what he was saying, Sam thanked the old woman and took off in the direction she had indicated, now surer than ever that they’d need all the caffeine and sugar he could find. 

+


	6. Chapter 6

+

**Five**

+

Dean was dreaming.

He knew that for a fact because a), he always knew and b), standing in Bobby’s living room, which was several hundred miles away, was kind of a dead giveaway. He looked around, checking if there was a dream Bobby to go with Bobby’s dream place, but found no-one until he rounded the final corner and found himself back in the living room.

“This is nice,” Ja- Anne said as she turned in a slow circle, taking in the fading paint job, the aging couch, the walls plastered with notes, maps and clippings, and the books on every available surface.

“No, it’s not,” Dean rebuked with a snort because unless you had an emotional tie to this place, it was ugly as a monkey’s butt. While he spoke, he checked Anne over, not really surprised to see her in his dream. He had kind of… felt her, digging a hole in his defenses, slipping in. He didn’t know how she’d done it and decided, in typical Dean-fashion, to ignore the whole thing because it had the potential of freaking him out. Now she stood in his living room, short, blonde, looking only a bit better than her real, hospitalized self.

“Sam said there’d be screaming and bloody murder around here,” he stated conversationally after the chick finished her perusal of his dreamscape. 

“There is,” Anne told him, pointing one dainty hand toward the window. “It’s what the… what _it_ looks like, inside. Your brother couldn’t hold it back when I used its power to talk to him. But you kinda built this place. Which is totally cool.”

While she rambled on, Dean stepped up the window, looking outside and finding exactly what Sammy had described. Endless darkness with small flashes of light illuminating gruesome scenes. Not all of them were deaths, but they all definitely belonged in a horror show of the very not-fun variety. And smack in the middle of it stood Singer’s Salvage, with Dean and Anne inside, looking out.

“I didn’t do anything.” He turned back to her and found her flipping through an ancient tome which was mostly blank except for the few pages he had studied in real life and remembered by heart. There was nothing in there that could help them, he knew.

She looked up, shrugging. “Yeah you did. Without noticing. I told your brother, you’re brighter somehow. You control your dreams perfectly.”

He did? Time to test in, he decided, since he didn’t like Anne snooping around Bobby’s place. He screwed his eyes shut and imagined any generic highway bar he had ever been in. When he opened his eyes, he stood on the threshold of a cozy, wood-paneled room. The lighting was dim, the ceilings low and the pool table the brightest spot in the room, as it should be. Anne stood where she had stood when he had closed his eyes, about six feet away from him. Above her head a TV set was fixed to the wall, continuing to show the dark and light scenes that existed outside his dreaming. Apparently, he couldn’t shut it out completely.

He grinned at his success, slipped behind the bar to find himself a beer and asked, “What do you mean, brighter?”

She shrugged again. “Dunno. Not like I have a lot of experience with slipping into other people’s minds. Last night was kind of a first.”

He glared at her for that because no-one practiced anything on his baby brother. Not on his watch and not if it left Sam puking everything he’d ever eaten. 

She looked sheepishly away and kept right on talking. “But every other mind is kinda like a candle in the dark. Yours? Lighthouse. Totally. And you actually manage to hold on to something in here. I haven’t been able to do that since the first night.”

She smiled and the expression wobbled horribly as Dean really _looked_ at her. She was wearing leather pants and a nondescript black shirt. Basic hunting bad girl attire. But there were premature lines on her deathly pale face, bags like bruises under her eyes and she kept hugging herself like she was cold and he realized that she hadn’t been out there in the dark for a few minutes like Sam, but for two whole months.

Great, now he felt sorry for the chick.

He pulled out another beer and handed it to her, waiting until she’d wrapped both her hands around it before saying, “Talk to me. Sam said you didn’t have much time last night.”

Although she looked nothing like he’d described either. No flickering, no see-through. She seemed pretty solid from where Dean was standing.

“It’s daylight now. It sleeps. Just, first thing, don’t call it by any kind of name, okay? It’ll hear you.” She looked worried, wearied and exhausted. Not afraid. Not panicked. It went a long way to convincing him that this tiny thing really was a hunter and not just playing at it like little Jo.

“Okay. No saying the beastie’s name. We found your car. And your journal. Sam sent your notes to a friend of ours who might be able to figure out where you went wrong.”

She snorted as she popped her beer, giving up hugging herself for a while. “I know where I went wrong, alright. This thing is neither demon, nor human, nor spirit, nor any other corporeal thing. I thought if I combined all four kinds of binding, they were bound to work. They did, for a while.”

“Long enough to make it let those four people go, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah. And then it was getting free and I couldn’t have that. I pulled it into myself and yes, I know, stupidly self-sacrificing move. Been regretting it for a while. Seemed like the smart thing to do at the time though, you know?”

Kinda like selling your soul to bring your brother back to life because you couldn’t see past the next second without him there, couldn’t see past the paralyzing, simple fact of _Sammy’s gone_. Yeah, he knew.

“So it’s stuck in my body. With me. Which sucks. We’ve been having it out ever since but it keeps taking more and more dreams, beating me back. Which leads to what I have to ask you.”

Dean took a sip of his beer and just waited. “My body’s in a hospital, right?”

He nodded.

“You gotta steal me.”

A spray of beer hit the counter between them as he almost chocked on the drink. “What?!”

“It’s gotten a taste of having a corporeal form. From me. It wants my body and, believe me, not a good idea. You have to take my body somewhere where it can’t hurt anyone and if this thing takes over…”

She trailed off, looking at him with big eyes that he noted were green. Not begging, not asking, not crying. Simply saying how it had to be. If this monster took over her body, she wanted them to kill her. Just like that. Bullet to the head and hope it killed the… thing, too.

“Are you sure that’s what it wants?”

“Yeah. We’ve been fighting forever. I used to win, but lately…It gets stronger all the time and I…,” she looked away from him for the first time while speaking, tracing her fingertips over the hard grain of the counter top, pressing down hard, as if she couldn’t feel it. “I’m drowning in all those nightmares. I’m forgetting what it’s like to be real and that makes it kinda hard to hold onto it, you know?”

He didn’t. But he winced in sympathy nonetheless. What would he feel like if he suddenly lost his body? Without touch, without taste, without anything that he could take and use as a weapon. No guns, no knives, not even blunt objects to defend himself with. Only dreams and nightmares, illusions, nothing more. This Anne had to be a lot tougher than she looked, if she still had all her cookies in the jar after two months of this shit.

“We’re working on it. There’s gotta be a way to bind this sucker and then,” he waggled his eyebrows in lieu of a proper ending to his sentence and beamed as she cracked a smile. Her first. 

“So how’d you find me and Sam?” he asked as he slipped past her towards the pool table and started lining up the balls.

“It brushes the minds of everyone around here, tasting them, kinda. Looking for the really good nightmares. It touched you two and I recognized that you’re hunters.”

Dean looked up from his task, fixing her with a serious expression. “If it’s looking for bad nightmares, is it gonna come for my brother an’ me?”

She shook her head hard, sending her hair flying. “No. No way. I’m shielding you from it and there’s no way I’m letting it get you. Don’t look at me like that. Purely selfish reasons. You two are my only shot at ever waking up and I’m going to do whatever it takes to keep you out there and working on this.”

He raised his hands, palms out. Relax. No harm. “A’right. I’m glad you’re doing it, whatever your reason. This,” he pointed at the TV’s endless loop of horror, “doesn’t look like my idea of fun. Back to the monster. Trying to steal your body. Got free because of the binding circles on your little experiment. Weaker during daylight. Anything else you can tell me?”

She scrunched up her nose cutely in thought before raising one hand and starting to tick off points, “Don’t die. Be careful. Please save me? That’s pretty much it.”

Dean nodded and cracked a small smile. It’d been a while since anyone had told them to be careful. Actually, except Ellen, no-one had since Dad. Bobby sometimes opened his mouth, words on the tip of his tongue, but he never said it because it sounded too much like goodbye. Hunters avoided goodbyes if they could. Pretend you’ll live forever and you might just make it one more day. 

“Okay. Is there anyone you want us to call? Friends, family? Your cell was turned off when they brought you in, so no-one’s been able to call anyone. Plus, I’m starting to think the police in this town is worth crap.”

Two months and they hadn’t even searched Anne’s car.

She grimaced. “Probably got fried by the backlash of my binding ritual. And no, no-one to call.”

“What about that Faith chick? Or your friend? Sand…something?”

“Xander,” she corrected with a little smile. “He’s in Africa and Faith has a two-year-old at home. They don’t need to worry about me.”

Despite understanding all too well where she was coming from, he still felt the need to point out, “You’ve been MIA for two months. They’re probably already worried.”

Her smile turned stale. “Exactly. I’ve been MIA for two months and no-one’s missing me yet. Just don’t let me die and I’ll be fine.”

For a minute Dean just looked at her, long and hard, trying to figure out if she was playing tough, or if she meant what she said. Then he decided it was none o’ his business and shrugged. “Whatever. I guess I’ll get going then.”

He raised one hand in a sloppy salute when she suddenly stiffened, back turning rigid. “Could you…” she snapped her mouth shut, biting her lip. 

It suddenly occurred to Dean that Anne was actually cute. Downright sexy in fact, if one could ignore the ghostly complexion and tired looks. And yet he felt absolutely no desire whatsoever to hit on her. Maybe he was getting old.

“What?” he demanded. Whatever she’d been about to say, it obviously mattered to her. He might have been a jerk occasionally – okay, a lot – but he didn’t intentionally stomp on people.

“Nothing. Silly. Forget it.” She shrugged negligently and turned away from him.

“What. Did. You. Want. To. Say?” he reiterated very slowly, making it clear that he did actually want to know.

“I was going to ask if you could stay for a while. This place is gonna fade when you wake up and it’s kinda… quiet, what without the screaming and dying and stuff.”

Aw, shit. Why’d she have to ask something like that? There was no way he could turn her down. He knew, even in sleep, that it was hours till sundown and Sam would wake him if there was anything they could do. So he had no reason to wake up and leave her to the Nightmare’s screwed up insides. He floundered for a moment, groping around for something to say and finally settled on, “Do you play pool?”

Her smile reminded him vaguely of a sunrise after a long, painful night of getting thrown around by a nasty spirit. Bright. Warm. Happy. She wasn’t going to thank him because that would be admitting that she’d asked for something she needed and he knew, without knowing her, that she wouldn’t do that. Anne stood on her own two feet and she loathed, absolutely loathed, needing help. Just like he did. Maybe Sam was right. Maybe this _was_ some sort of female version of him.

Then she shook her head and he kicked that thought to the curb. “Sorry. I’m more of a scrabble person.”

Scrabble. Huh. Okay. “Wanna talk?”

She hesitated briefly, like someone used to picking and choosing their words carefully in order to not give away secrets. Then she plopped down in the nearest booth and scooted down the bench so he could sit, too. 

“Whaddya wanna talk about?”

“Dunno,” he admitted. “How’d you get to huntin’?”

“Weeell,” she rolled her beer, as yet untouched, between her palms, “Didn’t have much choice. This guy showed up, told me I was chosen to fight the war of good and evil, protect the world, blablabla. People started dying. And that was pretty much it. You?”

“Family business. Was raised to it,” he said almost automatically as his thoughts fell over each other. Guy showing up. Chosen child. Destiny. War. Visions. Psychic. Feeling this Nightmare. It all sounded too damn familiar. So her age wasn’t exactly right and she hadn’t been in Cold Oak but there was always a possibility, right?

“Hey,” he asked, as nonchalant at possible, “You ever met a demon with yellow eyes?”

She looked at him, nose scrunched up again. “No. Why?”

“Just wonderin’. Some of the stuff you said sounded familiar.”

“Oh.” She left it at that.

“So… ehm… I found those shuriken in your trunk.”

“Awesome, aren’t they?”

Dean nodded emphatically and that set off a discussion about weapons, which segued into hunts, which ended up being a retelling off all sorts of funny shit they’d both run into over time. It was fun for a while, until, suddenly, Anne started flickering like Sam had described.

She faded mid-sentence and came back, noting his confused expression and immediately drawing the right conclusion. “Time’s up,” she chirped, trying to smile and make light of it.

Before he could answer, she faded again and he almost thought she’d stay gone. Then she showed back up, all color she had gained during their little vacation gone from her face.

“Work’s calling,” she joked and he didn’t even try to crack a smile.

“You’ll be alright?”

She flickered again.

“Just get me outta here and I will be,” she told him, all attempts at joking gone. She got up from the booth and looked down at him one last time. Just looking. Memorizing his face, he realized. He looked back, motionless and steady, letting her have her memory of a real person and seeing, under her smiles and bright green eyes, a woman who was at the end of her rope. She’d been fighting this thing for months, literally every single night. 

She wasn’t going to give up and she wasn’t going to give in but Dean knew that look. Dad had had it before the trap, Sam had worn it from time to time when his visions threatened to blow his head to bits and goo, and the mirror showed it, too, occasionally. It was the look of someone who had long since run out of reserves and gotten so used to running on empty, they couldn’t remember what it was like to not be about to just drop dead.

Then she flickered one last time and was gone. Dean put down his beer, took one last look around the bar, avoiding the TV on the wall. He stood and closed his eyes. 

When he opened them, he was back in the real world.

+

Sam found Dean wide awake, pacing the room when he got back. He closed the door behind himself, getting no reaction from his brother until he set down the bag full of junk food and offered, “Guess what I found out?”

Dean whirled around, startled by his voice more than his words, Sam guessed. He rubbed his temples, grimacing. Headache. 

“What?” he finally asked, gruffly. He looked more tired than he had before his nap.

“Last night the Nightmare took a couple. Two people in one night, Dean.”

“Crap. That means we gotta step up the pace.”

“Step up the pace for what, man?” Sam wondered, finally stepping in his brother’s path to get the other man to stand still and actually look at him while he talked. They didn’t exactly have a plan to speed up, did they?

Dean braked hard and glared half-heartedly before turning and starting to sort through the goodies the younger Winchester had brought. He immediately zeroed in on the XXL bag of M&Ms and ripped it open, almost spilling the colorful candy everywhere. 

“I dreamed,” he finally said around a mouth full of peanuts, munching manically.

“You dreamed? Wha – shit. You saw Anne, didn’t you?”

At the other’s nod, his eyes automatically went to the trash can in the corner. But Dean looked fine, not even remotely shaken. Tense and angry, keyed up, but not sick like Sam had been. 

Dean, sensing his concern, waved it away. “Nevermind that. I locked the shit outside. We talked.”

Wait. “What do you mean, you locked it outside?”

The way his brother stuffed his face with candy and shrugged the whole thing off was the best and only proof he needed that something weird had happened while he’d been asleep. Well, weirder than meeting comatose girls that gave cryptic advice. Sam frowned at his own thought process and shook his head. Sometimes his life got too bizarre, even for his admittedly lax standards. 

“Dean, talk to me. What happened?”

Looking irritated, Dean swallowed and dropped his primary source of sustenance on the table without care. “Nothing, okay? I learned a cool trick, that’s all. Now can we focus on the job?”

‘Nothing’ was secret Dean Winchester code for ‘something happened that freaked me out but I won’t tell you because I’m a shit that way and like to keep everything bottled up inside’. Sam had been trying to find a way around ‘nothing’ since the age of six and he had yet to succeed. The only tactic that was even remotely effective was backing off and pushing slowly, over a period of time, always just a bit more, until he had all the facts he needed. Or waiting until Dean got hurt and doping him up on the good stuff and then going all interrogation on his ass. Only when he did that, Dean usually found a way to get revenge and that sucked. 

So the first tactic was the way to go and Sam raised a hand, peace man, and let the whole thing go. For now.

“Okay. The job. Why the hurry?”

“Because the Nightmare is trying to take over Anne’s body and she says she can barely hold it back as it is. If the thing snacked on two people last night – “

“She won’t stand a chance.”

“Yep. We need to get her body out of hospital.”

Sam opened his mouth to protest but quickly shut it again when the other man glowered, “Don’t even start. She asked me to. She doesn’t want to be responsible for hurting anyone.”

Okay. So. How do you steal a body from a hospital? Sam ran a hand through his hair and wished, just for a moment, that he lived on a very lonely island somewhere in the Caribbean. Peace. Quiet. No demons, no nightmares, no comatose girls that asked to be kidnapped in dreams. “A’right. So we take her body. And then?”

Dean shook his head, half shrugging as he dropped into a chair. “I got no idea, man. But we gotta get her out of there, Sam.”

“The hospital?”

“The Nightmare. We talked for a bit and, dude, that girl’s just about done fightin’.”

This just kept getting better, didn’t it?

+


	7. Chapter 7

+

**Six**

+

Sam had pulled a lot of stupid stunts in his career as demon hunter extraordinaire. 

Burning down a municipal building to kill the spirit in the plumbing came to mind. Impersonating an FBI agent and walking right into the middle of an investigation that had Dean as the main suspect. Getting mixed up with a bank robbery. Shooting himself point blank with rock salt to get rid of the ghost trying to possess him and damn if that hadn’t hurt like a bitch. 

All in all, crazy, insane, mad, loopy, nuts and totally unstable were terms he had applied more than once to their hare-brained schemes. But this one took the cake. They were going to steal a patient from a hospital. 

Get this: Steal. A Patient. As in, a person who was sick. Comatose actually. From a hospital. Nurses and doctors and a million machines that would start beeping as soon as Anne mysteriously stopped being hooked up to them. Not to mention security and cameras and a thousand other things that would trip them, get them arrested and tried for being perverse coma-patient-nappers. 

Henriksen was going to keel over from laughing so hard when he got the call that his favorite two fugitives had been caught. Right before he would come down on them with an eternity in solitary. Which, Sam thought, trying to see the silver lining, was better than communal showers and dropping the soap. Loads better. Really.

Who was he kidding? They were totally done for. Dead. Over. History. He sighed and banged his head against the wall as he waited for Dean to fumble open the basement window that would be their way into the hospital on this fine night.

“What?” Dean snapped from where he was kneeling, blindly trying to figure out the mechanism of the window lock by feel only.

“You know that we’re going to get caught, right?”

“I’m so glad you’re an optimist, Sammy,” was the growled response.

“Seriously, dude. We’ve pulled some shit. But this tops ‘em all.”

The lock finally clicked and Dean pushed the window open, tilting his head upwards to grin at his eight foot eleven little brother. “Have some faith, man!”

Then he disappeared into the black mouth of the basement, feet first, leaving Sam to either follow or stay where he was, looking stupid and suspicious. 

He wondered if they let you have books in solitary and sorted out his legs to slide into the basement after his brother, almost bumping into the other man as he landed. He opened his mouth to complain when Dean motioned for him to shut up. A moment later, a nurse smelling of cigarette smoke came out of the boiler room and walked past them, oblivious. Wow. Five seconds into the whole thing and they almost got caught already.

“This is going to end badly,” Sam hissed once more as they both straightened.

Dean rolled his eyes, a hint of honest annoyance seeping through. “I’ll put it on your tombstone. Now get moving.”

Sam frowned but went, silently. Dean never cracked jokes about Sam dying. His own death was fair game, even now, after the deal, but Sam’s survival only ever got picked on when Dean was really annoyed. O-kay. So maybe he had been complaining a bit much he decided as he snuck up on the overweight security guard manning the surveillance cameras and knocked the man out with a single blow to the neck. 

Dean’s plan was full of holes but it was the best they had, and it wasn’t like they had much choice. Lord knew what would happen if the Nightmare gained a body in the middle of a building filled to burst with defenseless, sleeping people. 

Carefully lowering the man to the ground, Sam flupped into the newly vacated swivel chair and started typing away on the keyboard. After a few minutes – he may he have gone to college but he was pre-law not pre-world-class-hacker – he found what he was looking for and more or less simply switched off the cameras all over the hospital. Then he clapped once, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the silence, and leaned back to wait. 

The rest was up to Dean.

+

Dean waited until he heard Sam’s all-clear before leaving the basement. There weren’t all that many cameras in the aging, small town hospital, but they covered all entrances and both the elevators and stairwells.

Usually they would have found a more sophisticated way to deal with security but they didn’t exactly have time on their side. They just needed to be fast enough to be long gone when the next check-in was due. Which, according to Sam’s last minute digging, should be in thirteen minutes. Time enough, he told himself as he made his way to the elevator, pushing a laundry cart that he had in a last minute change of plan, filled with clean linen from a store room, instead of dirty. 

He pressed the button for the third floor and pulled two little brown bags out of the maintenance overalls he was wearing. After making sure his cap hid most of his face he took one bag in each hand, and started muttering a Latin incantation under his breath. 

These little charms were actually part of a simple cleansing ritual that would be of no use in this case, except that it had a wonderful side effect of messing with every bit of modern technology in a ten foot radius once activated. They had toyed with the idea of messing with _all_ the technology in the building, just to be on the safe side and have more time, but in the end, people’s lives depended on the machines they were hooked up to. So they’d found a compromise. Small scale attack on two of the six rooms housing the coma patients.

Since they knew, more or less, what was wrong with those patients, they didn’t feel guilty about making their machines go haywire. They’d be fine, their bodies were stable and healthy. Except for the whole coma part. 

The elevator opened on the right floor just as Dean finished the incantation. He took a deep breath and pushed the cart out into the pediatric ward. 

Showtime. 

He passed the nurses’ station without any trouble. None of the nurses they’d met the day before were on duty. Small mercies. He turned a corner and reached the first of the coma rooms. The door was open. As was the one to the next room.

With a whispered final word, he activated the spell bags and threw them into the rooms. Immediately all sorts of warning sounds went off inside and behind him, where the nurses were having coffee. He heard steps and hurried to push his cart out of the way and toward Anne’s room. The disturbance wouldn’t last more than a few minutes and eventually they’d figure out it was all false alarms. He quirked a grin as he wondered if they’d ever figure out that it was the little bags on the floor that had caused the mess. 

Once he reached Anne’s room – unhindered so far - he faced another problem. A million wires and tubes were attached to the small woman, most of them connected with some sort of alarm, too. Crap. So much for plans made up on the spot. Oh well. In for a penny.

Hoping that all the personnel on this floor was occupied in the other two rooms he started removing needles, tubes and wires as fast as he could, wincing when the IV left a bleeding wound on Anne’s arm.

Then he carefully tucked her sheets back around her and lifted her with them, shivering at the feel of her completely limp body in his arms. Her head lolled onto his shoulder as he bent and quickly lowered her into the laundry cart before taking a moment to arrange her limbs into something that was a little less likely to leave her bent like a pretzel and pushed her limp hair out of her face. Covering her with half a ton of sheets, he silently asked for forgiveness for stuffing her into the small and uncomfortable space.

Grabbing her purse and charm necklace out of the nightstand was a last minute thing. Clothes could be replaced. These things couldn’t.

Then he tucked his cap down once more and got the hell out of there. He took the long way around to the elevator, noting that the nurses and doctors were already starting to look suspicious as they could find nothing wrong with their patients. One of them suddenly looked up from a chart and right at him and it was a battle to not start running. 

Look like you belong, that was the trick. It didn’t matter that his overalls were a bad fit, that he had never been seen here before, that he was pushing a cart that he had no business with. He belonged here. He raised one hand slightly in greeting and the nurse gave him a minuscule nod before answering a doctor’s question.

Dean exhaled, inhaled, and rounded the last corner before breaking into a sprint. Almost done. Almost done. Now he just had to get down into the basement again and they were practically home-free. 

The elevator pinged just as he got there and he slipped inside, smiling at the man in the white coat that got off without more than a nod in his direction. Thank God for tired, overworked, stressed-out hospital personnel.

He counted down from fifty, reached the basement on twenty-seven and clapped once for Sam, who came jogging out of the surveillance room a moment later, a piece of cloth in his hands from wiping down everything he’d touched. 

Wordlessly, they worked together to haul roughly ninety pounds of comatose girl out of the cart. Sam picked her up and stood still as Dean tucked her blanket tight around her. Defeating the Nightmare with pneumonia would have been interesting, but if Anne ever wanted her body back, probably not the way to go. 

He scrambled out of the window they had come in through, and almost cracked his head open on the wall when Sam handed up their cargo. Finally he grabbed her under the armpits, locked his jaw and _pulled_. He ended up flat on his back with Anne lying on his chest, limp as a life-sized doll. Sam shimmied out of the basement, wiped the last of their prints and then turned to help his brother.

He didn’t make a single crack about Dean and girls falling all over him because they were both well aware that not only way this dangerous but also as low as they’d ever sunk. Anne needed care, machines, meds, nutrition that they couldn’t provide. If this job took longer than another day or two, they would probably end up with a dead girl on their hands. 

If she hadn’t asked Dean to do just this, they never would have even thought of taking her from the hospital. They fought evil, yes, but not at the expense of human life. Not at the expense of another hunter’s life, even if it meant she knew the risks better than others. 

This, right here, this topped interrogating the bereaved and digging up graves. Topped it by far. 

Sam took Anne, this time making sure she was all bundled up without his brother’s help and they took off at a jog just as the alarms started blaring behind them.

+

Dean chickened out once they reached their motel room and it was time to make Anne comfortable and Sam let him because he’d seen the look that crossed his brother’s face when he noticed that his rough landing earlier had left the knuckles of Anne’s left hand scraped and bloody.

They’d both seen more, so much more, than their fair share of blood and pain and death. They both knew how ugly humans could be, how terrible nature was, even without the aid of monsters. But there had always been lines they didn’t come near, things that just weren’t done. No-one gets sacrificed. No-one gets left behind. No-one’s not worth saving and nothing doesn’t deserve a chance. 

Tonight, they’d slipped and crossed many of those precious few lines that still remained intact after Yellow Eyes and their father’s legacy. Tonight they’d set a defenseless girl on a road that would kill her within days if they couldn’t fix it. Tonight, they’d put the hunt, the job, over a human life. 

That they had permission from the human in question was worth shit. 

Dean changed back into his usual ripped jeans and t-shirt combo and fled the room, his gun in stark relief against the small of his back. A safety blanket. Sam sighed and closed his eyes, wishing, wishing with all his heart and mind and soul, that for once, things could be easy. No more sacrifice. No more dead and dying and no more pain. Not for Dean, who had so little time left.

As usual, nothing changed, except that he got dizzy from screwing his eyes shut so tightly. He fetched a washcloth and a towel from the bathroom and winced as he started stripping the hospital gown off Anne’s skinny frame. He felt like a Class A pervert for undressing a comatose girl, and tried to notice as little of her body as possible while still checking her over for scrapes and injuries. 

He cleaned the grime from her and Dean’s pavement encounter off her and wrapped up her skinned knuckles, if only so Dean wouldn’t see, and pulled out the set of clothes they had picked up from her car earlier.

Sam was surprised when he actually found panties in the stack Dean had brought, but didn’t even try to put them on her. He had once spent a memorable thirty-five minutes wrestling a drunk and entirely uncooperative Jessica out of her clothes and into her pajamas. Since then he knew that there was quite simply no way to put underwear on a girl if she didn’t want you to. 

Instead he pulled the yoga pants up Anne’s legs and over her hips, breathing easier as soon as her private parts were covered again. The long sleeved shirt was a bit of a challenge, but he managed and put socks on her last. Then he tucked the hospital blanket back around her, adding his own on top and hoped to hell that she was comfortable. If she could even feel what was happening to her.

His eyes fell on the small heap of her beaded purse and jewelry that Dean had had packed away somewhere in his overalls. He picked up the necklace and ran the three charms through his fingers, somehow feeling that they were well loved and well worn. Maybe it was the psychic bullshit rearing its head again, or maybe it was simply one hunter understanding another, but Sam knew that this simple silver chain and the three charms attached to it were probably the most valuable thing Anne owned. He lifted her head enough to slip the chain over it and pulled her hair away to settle it properly. 

Above her heart, where it belonged. 

He stepped back, nodding to himself. He’d done all he could for now. 

With one last look at her, he stepped into the bathroom for a shower that would hopefully make him feel a bit better about all this. Afterwards he dressed and slipped into his sneakers to find Dean and tell him that it was safe to come back.

As expected, he didn’t have to go far. His brother had holed up in his car, blasting Metallica across the lot. _Enter Sandman_. Dean thought Sam didn’t know, but the song was as close as big brother ever got to admitting that he was angry and depressed about something. 

_Exit light, enter night._ It was the sad paraphrase of their entire lives. Everyday another flicker of light went out and a bit more of the darkness crept in. Sam knocked on the passenger side window and waited patiently as Dean turned off the music and exited the car. 

“Done?” he asked.

“Yep. All bundled up,” Sam supplied with more cheer than he felt. 

“Good,” was all Dean said as he took off toward their room.

“Listen, man,” Sam tried, not sure what he was going to say but feeling the need to somehow verbalize what was going on. Not only here and tonight, but in general. They’d crossed lines tonight, yes, but Dean had crossed a much bigger one when he’d made a deal with the devil. Just like their dad. Just as stubborn and selfish and stupid and selfless. 

And then they’d released an army of evil onto the world and that had been a line, too, and they hadn’t talked about it. Hadn’t talked about any of it. About Ash, who was dead, Ellen, who was practically homeless. All the hunters that were gone, all the people that were possessed and dead and dying, and the girl in their motel room, counting on them to put a bullet in her if - when - she rose and was the Nightmare.

They never talked about any of it, but they had to some time. Didn’t they?

“About Anne…”

“Forget it, Sammy.”

“I don’t want to, Dean. We always forget and ignore and pretend that nothing happened. It’s been a month and we haven’t talked about your stupid deal at all.”

“And we won’t,” Dean said in that voice, the voice that had ruled Sam’s childhood. Not Dad’s commanding tones, not the _please, Sammy, just go to sleep, I still have my homework and the laundry to do_. Sam had usually listened to both, but this was the voice that he had never, never disobeyed. This was Big Brother calling for him to hit the deck, this was telling him to shut up before he brought CPS down on them. Everything said in that voice was final. 

Had been final for the past twenty-five years. But no more.

No more, because in a year Dean would be gone and Sammy would never hear that voice ever again and he was tired of it. So tired.

“Yes we will. Because I’m not going to let this one go. Not this time.”

Dean stopped, looked at him, down and up, from his toes to his eyes, gauging his sincerity and finding a ton of it. He wouldn’t win. Not this time. Sam wouldn’t let him.

“Not during a hunt, we’re not,” he said, low and sure, the wobble in his voice almost unnoticeable unless you were, say, Dean’s brother. 

Not now. But later. It was as close to a promise as Sam was ever going to get from Dean on this and he knew it. He backed off. Later. After the hunt. He’d tie Dean down if he had to.

“Later, then,” he accepted and pushed past Dean into their room. He was suddenly feeling exhausted. Exhausted and tired. Very, very tired. Maybe he should lie down. Just for a while. There was nothing important to do anyway. He deserved a nap. He’d worked _so_ hard. And he could barely keep his eyes open at all. It was late, almost midnight. Time for bed.

+

Dean watched as Sam suddenly started swaying on his feet, eyes at half-mast as if he were about to fall asleep standing. Sammy just shucked off his shoes and curled up on Dean’s bed without so much as a by-your-leave, already half asleep. 

Dean looked over at Anne in Sam’s bed and frowned. Something wasn’t right.

Something was… ah, hell, what did he care? He was tired. So tired. And there was enough room left next to Sam to lie down, just for a minute. Just a little nap.

He was so tired.

+


	8. Chapter 8

+

**Seven**

+

Sam wasn’t all that surprised to find himself back in the darkness. 

After learning what this Nightmare was and what it was doing, he wasn’t even surprised that the flickering images all around him had grown in both number and vividness.

Six feet from him, a girl of maybe fifteen screamed for help as she wandered, lost, alone, and badly hurt through a phantom forest that seemed to creep closer by the second.

He flinched and looked away from her face as it was swallowed by her nightmare. 

Like the night before, the images burned holes into his memory, negatives of the worst horrors a thousand people had dreamed up all through the world and ages. No, he wasn’t surprised at being back here.

What did surprise him was that Dean stood right next to him, a solid presence at his side, the only source of warmth in this cold echo of nightmares.

“Dude. Why are we both here?”

Dean frowned, his gaze flickering from image to image even as he tried to focus on his brother’s face. “We both fell asleep. And judging by the way you went down, it wasn’t entirely voluntary.” 

He jerked around as a man screamed in pure panic behind him, an invisible drama happening before his eyes. “Is this place always like this?”

“It wasn’t like this when you came here?”

Dean shrugged uncomfortably and shook his head. A little girl rocked at their feet, curling into herself, eyes impossibly wide. Sam wondered if the vaguely dog-shaped shadow creeping around them was her nightmare or someone else’s. 

“We gotta get out of here.”

Sam nodded but couldn’t offer a way out. “Last time, Anne kinda kicked me out. I don’t know how to get out myself. What about you?”

Dean cocked his head to one side, concentrating. After a moment he jerked a bit and shook his head as if dizzy. “Nope. Can’t wake up.”

The younger Winchester’s eyebrows shot up of their own volition. He didn’t even know how to attempt to wake up but his brother seemed actually sort of… comfortable here? Not comfortable amidst the horrors of a thousand people, but comfortable in dreams. 

“Makes sense,” he found his own voice saying. “If the Nightmare pulled us under, it wouldn’t want us waking.”

Dean’s eyes widened comically as Sam called the thing by the name they had given it, cry of warning on his lips. But it was too late and Sam recognized his mistake as he felt the cold trickle of impending danger run down his back and suddenly knew, with perfect clarity, that the Nightmare was coming for them. 

He spun around to face the direction it was coming from but there was nothing there. Not yet. But there would be. In a few seconds…

“We need to get out of here!”

“We said that already, Sa – “

“No, Dean. It’s coming!”

“How do you know?” Dean asked, but he was already looking around for an escape route, never doubting Sam, even when he didn’t understand him.

How did he know? Sam had no idea. All he knew was that that feeling, that icy finger down his back, was familiar. His dreams, his visions of the future, had always carried the same tinge of dread. He opened his mouth to say that out loud, but found himself mute. His visions were gone. The demon was gone. He was normal. Just good ol’ Sammy again. No more freaky psychic shit. It was over!

“I just do,” he ground out and saw in the flicker of Dean’s steady gaze that his brother didn’t believe his excuse for one second. 

Then he grabbed his taller brother by the shoulder and jerked him closer. “Fuck this. We ain’t getting’ out. Hold on!” he ordered sharply.

Dean closed his eyes and a split second later the whole place slid… sideways, and Sam stumbled over the threshold of Bobby’s living room door. Dean let go of him, dropping on the creaking sofa with a grunt of exhaustion as his brother frantically scanned their surroundings.

“Where are we, Dean?”

He got a look that said, _whaddya think?_

Yeah, okay, Bobby’s place. He knew that. But where had it come from? Who had…?

“Hold on. Did you _make_ this?”

Again, Dean shrugged and turned away, clearly avoiding the topic. “I dreamed it,” he finally muttered, obviously hoping he wouldn’t be heard.

Sam couldn’t even wake up and Dean was doing, what, _landscaping_ in the Nightmare?

What. The. Hell?

There was a knock on the front door. Sam turned toward it, fiercely wishing for a gun, if only for the emotional comfort it represented. Dean stood and frowned at the door. 

“Do we open it?” Sam asked. This place was Dean’s creation, so he should know.

“Outside’s hell,” was the answer he received. His brother hadn’t just dreamed up this place. He had dreamed it up _inside_ the boundaries of the darkness.

The knock sounded again and this time a frantic voice accompanied it. “Dean? Let me in!”

Anne. 

Neither of the men moved. Might be Anne. Might be the Nightmare wearing her voice and body. Might be something else. They were so far out of their depth it was almost funny. Almost.

A beat passed before a single bang, like a fist against wood, sounded at the door. “Right. Stupid of me. Forget it. Just…”

Silence. Far away screams grew louder. Then Anne returned. 

“I’m losing. You gotta immobilize my body somehow. Stop it. And don’t sleep at night, okay?”

Dean bounced on the soles of his feet, looking torn. Sam had no such qualms. There was a girl on the other side of that door and she was in pain. They both heard it. Taking two swift steps forward he yanked open the door and almost got bowled over by the blonde that had been leaning against it. 

Anne fell against him just as he slammed the door shut again and he felt her shuddering gasps against him before Dean pulled her away.

“You okay?” he demanded, checking her for obvious injuries more out of habit than anything else. Nightmares didn’t leave traces and scars. Not visible ones at least.

Anne smiled, but it was a close call. She nodded.

“Sure. I’m fine. But it’s taken more people and I can’t hold it back from you two _and_ me. Not now that it’s found you.” She gasped and almost doubled over, clutching at her stomach. She wheezed and Dean grabbed her shoulders to keep her upright. One arm wrapped around her own midriff, the other moved upward and Sam noticed she was wearing the charms he had put on her body. She curled her free hand around them and seemed to straighten a bit.

“I can wake you up…,” she managed between heaving breaths, “…one last time. Immobilize my body. Don’t sleep at night. Beat this thing.”

She looked up suddenly, eyes bright with pain and determination. Sam swallowed and forced himself to meet her green gaze. She was giving up herself to save them. To give them more time. 

Sam wondered what would happen to her here. Would she fade until she was nothing more than a flickering image, her nightmares playing out for all eternity, all around her? Would she forget that she was a person and become one of those screaming, pleading ghosts?

“We can’t-“ he started to find himself cut off by her.

“You don’t get a choice,” she whispered and her gaze blazed with her decision. 

She reached out, one hand on Sam’s chest, one on Dean’s and pushed, throwing them out of the Nightmare and into reality. 

One last time.

+

“Demon or human dose?” Sam found himself asking twenty minutes later, syringe in hand, first aid kit open in front of him. Dean rolled the small brown bottle of horse tranquilizer between his fingers and considered the question, mostly just glad they _had_ something to immobilize Anne’s body with. 

Anything, even a demon, had trouble taking over a drugged-up body that refused to obey any commands from either brain or invader. Not that they usually used the tranq on demons, but there were things out there that didn’t need killing, only catching. A breed of werewolf, for example, that actually changed and didn’t eat hearts. Most of those people were perfectly alright once they knew what was going on and found a place to lock themselves up three nights of the month. 

Thus the Winchesters carried horse tranquilizer with them. And now they were going to use it on Anne. The problem was the dose. If they assumed the Nightmare had already mostly taken over, a human dose wouldn’t do much good. If it hadn’t and they assumed it had, a demon dose would kill Anne.

Choices, choices.

In the end it was Anne herself who made the decision when she twitched on the bed they had tied her to the moment they’d both woken up. Both brothers started violently, going for their guns, waiting for further movement. When none came after almost a minute, they relaxed minutely.

“Demon, it is,” Sam answered his own question and grabbed the bottle out of Dean’s hand.

A moment later he plunged the syringe into Anne’s thigh and hoped really hard that he hadn’t just killed her as he sat down next to her, two fingers pressed to her pulse point.

No convulsions. No cold sweats. No change in heart rate. Slowly, he exhaled and looked at the other man. “That should give us till sunrise. What do we do now?”

Dean lay back on his elbows on the other bed, his gun stark and black next to him on the cheap motel sheets and said, “We could talk about how you knew that thing was coming before it did.”

Right. That little trick.

“Or we could talk about how you built a house in the middle of that thing when I couldn’t even wake up.”

“I couldn’t either, remember?” the older brother pointed out, obviously trying to downplay what he’d done as always.

“Dean,” Sam warned, low and earnest. 

“Sam,” Dean mimicked, grimacing, voice high-pitched and grating. Sometimes the older of the two forgot that they’d been fighting for going on twenty-five years and Sam had long since learned all of his brother’s tricks. Making him angry in order to distract him had stopped working when he’d been twelve.

“I just want to know how you did it. I couldn’t do that and Anne couldn’t either.” Calm. Reasonable. It’d drive Dean up the wall and hopefully make him burst out with something he didn’t want to say.

“Just like I couldn’t feel that thing coming and you could, huh? Still having that headache, Sammy?” Apparently, Dean knew all of Sam’s tricks, too.

And as a matter of fact, yes, Sam still had a headache. A hand pressing against the nape of his neck, warning of things to come, of something pushing against the boundaries of sleep and night, wanting to invade the real world. He could feel the apprehension and lizard fear of the dog sleeping in the parking lot. The night had teeth.

But he wasn’t supposed to know that, wasn’t supposed to feel things like that, to know more than humans were supposed to know. He was just Sammy now, just the little boy that Dean had raised and dad had made a warrior. Not some boy king of hell, not a messiah or the antichrist. That was over. No more visions, feelings, yellow eyes and nightmares. 

No. More.

But that was stupid, wasn’t it? A man’s offspring didn’t die when he did and the demon’s blood inside of Sam had long since become his own. Why would his talents – gifts, curses – disappear just because Yellow Eyes had? He hadn’t forgotten how to shoot a gun when his father died, had he?

And now here he was, comparing the demon to his parents, a second father, a maker, shaper of all that was Samuel Winchester. It made him sick. Sick to know that somehow, the demon had played as big a part, if not bigger, in his creation, as his parents.

What _was_ he?

“I’m calling Bobby,” he snapped suddenly, and stood, marching into the bathroom where he didn’t have to look at his brother’s mug and the girl they’d kidnapped and drugged in the name of the greater good. Whatever that was.

+

Dean watched his baby brother go and knew exactly what he was thinking. He had raised the kid, for Christ’s sake. There wasn’t much he didn’t know about Sam. In fact, the only gap in his encyclopedic knowledge of all things Sammy was his time at Stanford and even that he could mostly fill simply by knowing every tick, quirk and habit his brother had. 

Dean watched Sam go and knew he thought he was a freak, hated himself for the psychic shit that seemed to be coming back, for the messed-up convoluted lives they led and for which he blamed himself. Without him, Mom would be alive and Dad, too and Dean would be normal, and maybe not even know how to shoot a gun. But he did. And that was what Sammy never understood.

Maybes don’t count. Never did. Mom was dead. Dad was dead. Dean would be in eleven months. Sam wouldn’t, and he had to damn well learn to live with that because if the little shit died before his time, Dean was going to crawl out of hell on all fours and haunt his ass for all eternity. 

He could have eased his brother’s pain. Could have told him that he had no idea why he had such an easy time in dreams, but that it had always been this way. His mind was his playground. He shoved things aside, pulled them back out, connected dots that seemed impossible to connect. He had drawers and filing cabinets and boxes full of junk in his head and he walked among them like the master of his domain.

Inside his head, Dean could do anything. Always had been able to. It was why he was still sane and functioning after all the shit they’d seen. His mind obeyed. He refused to have a nightmare? He didn’t have a nightmare. He needed to remember something that had happened ten years ago? He did. He needed to forget something in order to not start drooling and rocking in a corner? He did. 

He worked that way. It wasn’t anything special. Okay, so maybe most people didn’t have such rigid, freaky control over their minds but then most people weren’t expected to pull their own weight and that of their little brother from the age of four on. They hadn’t shot their first gun at six and killed their first spirit at seven. Even before he’d started school, Dean had had boxes in his mind. One for Sammy, one for Sammy’s care, one for Daddy, and one for Daddy’s care. One for school work and one for housework and one for being a kid and one for hunting and one for protecting Sammy and one for lying to snooping adults and one where everything from _before_ was stored, safely at the back of the shelf, like a treasure hoard. Compartmentalizing a life that, if he was honest, would have probably driven him around the bend otherwise. He’s been too many things to too many people at too young an age.

Contrary to popular belief, Dean wasn’t dumb. Occasionally, he even picked up a book without being forced to. He knew that his mental tricks and hoops were probably unhealthy and could be the beginnings of some severe mental fucks ups. But did he care? No. It allowed him to do his job and that was to keep his family together. Even his family of one. 

So he could dream a house into existence in the middle of a war zone inside his mind. Big deal. It was a natural skill, not a supernatural one.

He could have embellished the truth, could have told Sam how messed up his headspace really was. Could have distracted his brother with something else to analyze and fret about. He could have said, look Sammy, in my own way, I’m as freaky as you. So chill. It’s okay. I got you. I’ll take care of you and we’ll get through this just like we did before and everything will be okay. Okay. 

All the things he wanted to say.

But he would be dead in eleven months and Sam needed to learn to stand on his own two feet, to trust himself to be… to be the man he thought he wasn’t. 

Dean couldn’t hold his hand forever. Literally. So he let Sam stomp into the bathroom, tired and angry and scared and he didn’t say a word.

He had to learn.

+

Bobby had no news and no time to chat, so he hung up without saying goodbye, leaving Sam in the echoing, sterile silence of the bathroom. They still didn’t know how to bind the nightmare, pull it out of Anne, save her. Didn’t know why Sam was suddenly doing tricks again or if Dean was suddenly getting his own _Shining_. Four days ago, they’d been a pair of hunters on the road, doing their job. Now they were two brothers, falling apart at the seams about superhuman abilities, nightmares and a single girl that had, somehow, somewhere, become the symbol for all they had to fix.

Sam felt it in his bones, this desire. Make Anne right, and the rest would solve itself. And he couldn’t for the life of him say if that feeling was a fluke born from a wish or some psychic precognition offering a solution: Save Anne and she would be the key to unraveling the rest of their troubles. But things were never that easy, were they?

He opened the door quietly, surprised to find Dean sitting next to Anne, staring down at her pensively. 

“You better not die on me,” he muttered into his hands, almost too low to hear. “I kinda like you and I think Sammy does, too.”

Sam snorted and shook his head, laughing a bit. Yeah, he liked her. Even without ever having met her in person, without even having had a proper conversation with her, he liked her. Liked the wit and sarcasm in her journal, liked how she managed to smile even when she was tired, in pain, and fading into a nightmare. Liked that she understood the sacrifices and burdens of hunting. Liked that she made his brother like her.

“Damn right,” he found himself confirming. Dean quirked a grin and otherwise stayed silent.

+


	9. Chapter 9

+

**Eight**

+

Sunrise came four cups of instant coffee and six hours of frozen silence later. 

Silence that was born of Sam’s fear of his own insides and Dean’s silent and wavering determination, of their impotent waiting, their tired, heavy eyes. Silence born of twenty-five years of unspoken things and the endless stream of red numbers on the alarm clock that became more unbearable with every day that passed. Sam spent the silence calculating and recalculating Dean’s leftover time, every second a new equation and every one of them worse than the last. Dean spent it watching Anne breathe, flat and shallow, barely alive, watching Sam pace and drink coffee and worry as only those with too much heart do.

Hundreds of miles away, Bobby Singer wiped exhaustion from his worn eyes and found his gaze on the phone, knowing, somehow - inexplicably, as he tended to when it came to those boys - that he needed to call them now.

In Hollow Springs, Colorado, a cell phone rang and Sam’s shoulders rose as the weight of the hours was lifted from them, and Dean’s grin grew honest as silence fled their room.

“Mornin’ Bobby,” he chirped into the phone, not really as happy as he seemed, but relieved to finally, finally, be able to _do_ something other than sit and watch his brother run himself into the ground while Anne lost inch after inch in her invisible battle and the Nightmare loomed ever closer. And damn if all that hunting hadn’t left him with a tendency for bad drama.

“Mornin’?” the older man demanded roughly, “Kid, it’s barely past midnight.”

“Sun’s risin’,” Dean supplied and knew that Bobby would understand. He put the phone on the nightstand, speaker on. 

Sam waved at the small device and grunted a weary, “Hey, Bobby.”

“A’right then, first things first. When that girl’s safe and back in her body, you two are bringing her to me.”

“Bobby,” Dean drawled, “You haven’t even met the girl. ‘Sides, she’s a bit too young for you, you rascal.”

“Shuddup. That girl you got there’s a genius. It took me most of yesterday just to retrace her research and understand what she was doing. Dean, that girl picks out magic and spells like you pick out patterns.”

Dean lowered his head and looked away because if he’d had any say in it, not even Bobby would know that famous John Winchester’s patterns were and always had been the work of Dean, his little toy soldier, sneaking out of bed in the wee hours of morning to climb onto the kitchen chair and sort through heaps of research with an eye for detail that had left John standing in the doorway, stumped, on a regular basis.

 

“You think she’s a witch?” Sammy asked, mostly because he couldn’t fathom what other conclusion Bobby wanted them to draw. 

“Nah. See, you can fire a gun without knowin’ how it works, can’tcha?”

Dean rolled his eyes and huffed and Bobby, knowing them too well, amended, “Fine. Then you can use a spell without understanding how it works.”

“Okay,” Dean accepted and Bobby growled in faked annoyance.

“This girl o’yours, she understands. She knows the magic _behind_ the spells. So you can imagine the size o’ the headache this research gave me.”

“Sorry,” Sam immediately, offered only to be waved off with a grunt.

“Learned some interestin’ stuff, so nevermindya.”

“You found a solution for the place where Anne went wrong?”

“No.” The brothers slumped. “I did you one better. Once I figured out what she was tryin’ to do, I figured out what this thing is. She understood it, but couldn’t name it. It’s a Walking Nightmare, African dream god, Greek Oneiros, dream demon.”

“She wrote that, somewhere, Walking Nightmare. You got more on it?” the older brother asked even as he started flipping through Anne’s journal, looking for the words in question.

“Yeah. Greeks say these things are the sons of sleep. African lore says they were born when a Shaman dreamed. Magic and dreams form an entity that gains a sort of conscious and starts devouring other dreams.”

“You’re telling me,” Sam grunted as he finally succumbed and dropped next to Dean on the unoccupied bed. “This one’s got thousands of nightmares inside of it.”

“You’ve actually _seen_ them?”

“It tried to eat us,” he supplied drily. 

“Well shit. Now listen, those things can only be trapped in a special circle, complicated as hell. I’m sending the sketches to you as soon as we’re done.”

Relief. Finally something was going right. If they could bind the thing, trap it in a circle - that meant they could stop drugging Anne and find a way to pull it out of her somehow.

“And then how do we kill it?”

Silence stretched and grew for a minute as Bobby shuffled papers and finally admitted, “I don’t know. This thing wasn’t _born_. I’m not sure you _can_ kill it.”

“Damnit!” Dean cursed violently, flinging the journal on the nightstand. “There’s gotta be something, Bobby. Nothing’s immortal.”

“Listen boys,” the older hunter tried, soothingly, the way he talked to skittish animals. “I’ll keep lookin’. And I’m sending you all I found, so you can look it over. Maybe I missed some’n. And Dean?”

“I know. Don’t yell at you. We just lost too many people these last coupla months.” He rubbed a hand over his face, ran in through his hair and picked the journal back up, tucking stray clippings back where they belonged, not meeting his brother’s gaze or even looking at the phone. 

Dean didn’t usually admit to things like that. Too chick flick-y. But they’d been running from one case to the next since the Devil’s Gate and the only breaks they got were in the car, between jobs. Maybe, Sam thought as he absently told Bobby goodbye and thanked him, they deserved a vacation after this one. Take a few days off to recharge, see some sights, eat ice-cream, catch a movie when it actually came out, not two years later on crappy motel TV. 

He promised himself to convince Dean as soon as the Nightmare was defeated and ignored the small voice at the back of his mind telling him he never would ask. There was too much to do.

There always was.

Patting Dean on the knee, he got up to hook the printer up to his laptop and see what Bobby had sent them. They still needed to find a way to kill the Nightmare. And they only had a little less than twelve hours of sunlight left to do it. 

+

Dean went to find them something to eat, muttering about how one more drop of acid instant coffee was going to burn a freakin’ hole into his stomach and wouldn’t that be a way to go. Death by coffee. Sam remained behind, one eye on their chained up house guest on the bed, still and oblivious to the world, nothing but the steady beat of her heart to prove she was alive. The other eye was occupied with sifting through the ton of print outs from Bobby’s research. 

Anne’s sketches of rituals and binding circles had been a mess but now, after the old hunter had had them for a day, the notes in the margins had notes in the margins. After only thirty minutes and a shallow first glance through the papers, Sam was already wondering if letting those two meet was a good idea.

Dean returned and they had breakfast and more coffee. Briefly, they considered taking turns sleeping during the daylight hours but in the end it wasn’t worth the risk. They could remain awake for another day and hopefully, this would all be long over by sunrise tomorrow. Then they could sleep. 

They split the leftover bagels and work in two, Sam staying at the table, Dean spreading his notes all over the bed, sitting in the middle, frowning a lot. 

“Did Bobby find anything wrong with how Anne drew those four people’s souls out of the Nightmare?” he suddenly asked, not looking up from where he was comparing Anne’s original scribblings to Bobby’s improved ones. 

“Nope. It worked. The only thing that was faulty, far as I can see, was the circle she trapped it in.”

“So we could use her ritual?”

Sam grimaced as he went over the theory in his head and then started shuffling papers wildly until he found a page that listed, more or less, the whole ritual Anne had thrown together from three languages, four other rituals, and two spells. He scanned the list and worried his lower lip, thinking hard.

“Dean?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you get Anne’s books from her car? I want to double check all this.”

His brother was already moving, digging through his jacket pockets for the Mustang’s keys. “But you think it might work?”

“If – and that’s a big if – we can somehow fit the circle Bobby found into it and smooth out a few other hitches that might cause problems? Maybe.”

“Well, I don’t know ‘bout you, but this is the best news I’ve heard in three days,” Dean threw over his shoulder as he jogged into the parking lot toward space number ten.

+

“Chalk?”

“Check.”

“Iron?”

“Check.”

“Candles?”

“Check.”

“St. John’s bread?”

“The hell is that?” Dean asked, looking up, brow furrowed.

“Carob tree,” Sam supplied after a quick google search on the computer at his elbow. He watched as his brother grumbled something unflattering under his breath and started digging through their ‘wood bag’. It was a duffel bag that held all their stakes and other wooden paraphernalia. With a cry of triumph, Dean pulled a foot long stake out of the bag and brandished it in the direction of the table.

“You sure that’s carob? Because if not…” Sam trailed off, not needing to finish his sentence. 

Dean rolled his eyes at his worry wart of a brother and flipped the stake in his hand, showing the dull end, where a small ‘C’ was carved into the wood. Sam choked back a laugh. Trust his brother to mark his stakes.

“Why do we have that anyway?”

“Kishi demon. Man eating bastard, African origin. Needed to be killed with African wood.” From the wince that quickly faded from the older Winchester’s face, it had been a tough hunt.

Another one where Sam hadn’t been there, but in Stanford, living the life. Another one where Dean had gotten hurt because he hadn’t been there to cover his brother’s back. He wanted to ask for details but he knew he wouldn’t get them. Especially not if the job had gone as badly as his grimace indicated. He turned back to his list.

“Salt and the silver knives?”

Dean flung the stake on the bed and went back to sorting through their stuff.

“Check and check. That all?”

Sam nodded at his brother’s impatient tone and waved a negligent hand for Dean to sit back down. “That’s all we need for the circle to trap it. Problem is, the stronger we want to make it, the bigger it has to be. No way we can pull it off here.”

“Wouldn’t anyway, Sammy. Too many people.”

“Then where? I haven’t seen that many exorcism friendly places around here.”

Dean shrugged and closed his eyes, mentally going over all the places they’d been in the past few days. Anything within city limits was off because there’d be people and those always caused trouble. There was a field behind the motel, but still too close to civilization. “We passed a field when we got here. Surrounded by woods on three sides, pretty well covered from the road, too. And plenty big enough.”

“You sure?”

A nod. Yeah, Dean was sure. He wouldn’t have suggested it otherwise. 

“So, we have it trapped. What next?”

“Setting those poor schmucks in the hospital free,” the older man supplied, waving some of Sam’s notes in his face.

“Right,” Sam agreed, digging through the layer of paper that covered the entirety of the table and quite a bit of the grubby floor, too. “Where’d I put the papers for that?”

Wordlessly, Dean reached over and poked the stack right in front of his brother with a single digit. Sam deflated. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Sammy, we’ve been over this. We know from Anne herself that this part worked. The binding circle shouldn’t really mess with the… whatever this is because it’s a separate piece of magic, right? Anchored and all. We gotta figure out how to kill the sucker.”

Sam, giving up on his notes, looked up at his brother through his lashes and made a face. “I don’t think we can, Dean. I haven’t found a single scrap of lore that mentions killing a Nightmare. It’s not actually alive in the first place.”

“Neither are vampires. Or ghouls. Or spirits. We seem to manage killing them just fine.”

“Yeah. But we know _how_ to kill all those things. Maybe there is a way. But we won’t find it with only a few hours left to look. Let’s just focus on trapping the thing. Pull it out of Anne and bind it to something. _Then_ we can research ways to kill it.”

“Because last time that worked out so well,” Dean snapped, referring to Anne’s attempt at trapping the Nightmare. And the outcome. Her incomplete binding had, in fact, trapped the thing inside of her, bound it to her soul. If Sam was brutally honest with himself, he wasn’t completely sure they could save Anne at all. If her soul was too bound to the Nightmare, she’d become trapped with it in whatever the bound it to. 

On the other hand, “The binding ritual was fine. It was the circle that gave out. We know that. Plus, pulling all those dreams from it should weaken it. That gives us the advantage.”

Dean, thinking back on the howling darkness and the flickers of horror inside, grimaced. He wasn’t entirely sure anyone could ever have the advantage over that thing. 

+

Sam packed all the ingredients for the circle into an extra bag while Dean chopped his carob stake into twelve equal pieces. Once that was done they started gearing up, knives, guns, holy water, even a can of hairspray and a lighter for Dean, who just loved his little homemade flame throwers.

After that, Dean untied Anne from the bed and put handcuffs on her before wrapping her in the hospital blanket she’d spent the day under. Sam, meanwhile, just sat on the other bed, going over his notes one more time.

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“Don’t be such a whiny, little bitch,” Dean grunted as he maneuvered Anne’s limp form into a sitting position. 

“Jerk,” Sam responded automatically to the insult and then shook his head, tucking his notes away. He was being a bitch. They’d done all they could, gone over everything three times too many. Anything that didn’t work by now, wouldn’t work if he worried himself sick either. It was why they worked together so well. Dean was too much action and too little worry and Sam was the other way around. They tempered each other. Dean told Sam when to stop fretting and get moving and Sam saved Dean from jumping in without the slightest clue as to what was going on. Teamwork. 

Sam picked up the bag and opened the door for Dean, who had his arms full with the comatose, possessed girl. They made their way to the car, where one of the cleaning ladies looked at them funny until Dean made a loud and crude comment about women not being able to hold their damn liquor. They both sagged with relief when the woman shook her head, clicked her tongue, and disappeared into room number twenty-five. 

Bag in the trunk, Anne on the backseat, Sam sitting shotgun, and Dean behind the wheel, they were off with a rumbling growl and two hours left until sunset.

+

Dean kept his eyes and gun trained on Anne while Sam walked the perimeter to make sure there was no trouble waiting to jump out at them and then started setting the circle around Dean and their companion.

The field was barren and covered mostly with leaves from the surrounding forest, soggy and sticking to the ground in a solid carpet of muck. Which was good because it made laying the salt down easier. Grass and salt, Sam knew from experience, didn’t go too well together. One stupid bit of grass in the wrong place, and the whole circle was broken. Or wind. Don’t even get him started on wind. 

“How long?” he asked without looking up from walking the circle with a bag of salt.

“Ninety minutes,” Dean supplied calmly. They needed everything to be completely set by sundown because as soon as the Nightmare stirred – and it would stir, just like it had the night before, because Anne couldn’t hold it back anymore – they needed to start the exorcism. They had considered doing it during daylight, but they had no way of knowing if the Nightmare was even _in_ Anne when the sun was up. They might have ended up cutting her soul’s last ties to her own body instead. 

They’d opted for waiting until they were sure the Nightmare was present for its own exorcism instead of risking it.

Sam chucked the bag aside and pulled out another one, this one filled with simple grey stones (collected from the edge of the motel parking lot). He carefully sketched the necessary runes on them with chalk before walking the circle for the second time, setting up the twelve runes with a compass to check their exact positioning. 

“If it starts raining again, we’re fucked,” Dean supplied conversationally from the middle of the circle, where he stood with Anne prone in front of him. They should have dressed her warmer. Or brought extra blankets.

“Needs to be chalk, though,” Sam returned with a shrug. Permanent marker would have been a safer bet, but changing too much about something like this was dangerous and the instructions Bobby had sent over explicitly called for white chalk. So that was that.

On his third round, he distributed the carob pieces, setting them between the runes. Dean watched silently as he then dug out their consecrated iron bullets and distributed them along the circle, too. Twelve of them. The second to last round Sam made with silver bullets, setting them up on the other side of the carob. Twelve again.

The salt circle was now almost completely hidden under the repeating sequence of rune, silver, carob, iron.

The last step was setting up four white candles - North, South, East and West - outside the circle. They remained unlit for now and would until a few minutes before sunset. Dean made a face. Forget rain, a simple _breeze_ would be the end of them if the candles went out. 

Since he’d spent the night trapped in a basement with that demon bitch after she’d _brought down the ceiling_ from inside a freaking Devil’s Trap, Dean was a bit skittish about things like that. 

That demon had proven, once and for all, that while circles trapped a physical form, you could still influence the world beyond the trap if you had enough power. It had brought down the ceiling around their ears. Somehow, Dean couldn’t shake the feeling that the Nightmare was a lot more powerful than that bitch had been. Especially after gorging itself on so many people over the past seven weeks and having a physical body for the first time. 

While Sam packed up the rest of the salt and settled in to wait, Dean simply stayed where he was, just outside the circle, gun drawn, watching Anne’s form. The Nightmare’s form. 

He wondered if Anne was still in there somewhere, after last night. She’d said it herself, she could protect either them or herself and she’d chosen them. Did that mean she’d succumbed to the Nightmare? Had it swallowed her whole like all the other people stumbling through the eternal night inside that thing?

They knew that the dreams and souls it stole weren’t assimilated immediately. Anne’s saving four people had proven that. But she’d been in there for two months, longer than any other victim. And that thing had her body now. Maybe it had cut the ties all the victims still had to their bodies, leaving her soul lost forever. Maybe she was already gone and they should simply shoot the thing between the eyes while they still had the chance.

Maybe, maybe. 

Dean rubbed his forehead and rolled his shoulders. Sometimes, this job just got to him.

+


	10. Chapter 10

+

**Nine**

+

The light sank further down the sky, growing weaker and weaker and dreams stirred all around, bloody, horrible, painful, gutting, dreams. It could hear them, could feel them gliding through the twilight, reaching for impossible things. 

Inside of It, a few of _them_ still moved, clamoring for freedom with pathetic whispers and pleas. Their dreams were small and they did not sate It. It swept over them in a wave of darkness and silence, muffling their screams.

Useless.

But the _other_ refused to be silenced, beating against Its darkness. It bled the little mortal, cut it, tore at it, but she kept raging. Her dreams soared and she refused to break. Annoying. It pushed her away, brushed her off like dirt, but she came back, again and again. 

She had taken the others away, shielded them, those bright red dreams It had so wanted to taste. It had made her suffer for it and she was weak now, but still she screamed. She never stopped screaming.

“And I never will,” she snarled, her voice echoing in Its depths, resounding and angry.

 _Hush_ , It told her, slapping her into the farthest corner of Its self.

She cried out in pain but did not stay down. Bug. Tiny, annoying, bug. But the light was almost gone and Its power rose from the deep as It spread black wings. Now the mortal was helpless before It, powerless.

It occupied her body, this strong, more-than-mortal form of flesh and blood. It had never wanted a body before, content to fly through dreams as a shape in the dark. But her body was different. More. So much more than that of the things whose dreams It rode.

Her body was strong. Capable. With it, It could break their shells as well as their minds, eat all of them, not just the dreams. With her body, It could experience all that of which It had only dreamed since its creation.

Carefully, slowly, It surged upwards, into Its new shell and did something It had never done before. It pulled muscles and skin, moved bone. 

It smiled.

+

Sitting around in a barren field watching a motionless girl in a magic circle was creepy. 

Kind of par for the course, but creepy. 

Watching as a grotesque smile suddenly split the motionless girl’s face in a way that was just _wrong_ was more than creepy. It was downright freaky. 

Dean jumped to his feet, gun cocked and turned to his brother, who was already flipping through a book, looking for the bookmark he had placed in it earlier. 

They’d been worried about how to tell apart the Nightmare from Anne. Looking at the jerking, convulsing motions of the slight body in the circle, the problem was solved. The Nightmare had never possessed a physical form before and it showed.

“God,” Dean grunted as he watched Anne’s body sit up, back lifting before the head or shoulders, “That’s just wrong.”

“Shaddup and light the candles,” Sam ordered without looking up from his book.

“Bitch,” Dean offered as he started circling to light the four candles, never taking his eyes off the Nightmare. With a small twist of the wrists, the cuffs they had left on Anne broke. Well, crap.

“Jerk.”

By the time he lit the last one, Sam had found what he was looking for and, book in one hand, loose papers in the other, he looked up at his brother. “I got it.”

Dean opened his mouth to tell him to get on with it already, when the Nightmare finally figured out how to put its new body into a vertical position and started tottering toward them, the disfiguring grin still plastered on its face. 

“I will devour you,” it rasped, Anne’s sweet and light voice horribly distorted by a dragging accent and a purely monstrous growl.

Dean just smirked and aimed his gun right between its eyes. Just in case. “Any time now, Sammy.”

“I will feed on your dreams, mortal, and your flesh!”

Great. Cannibalistic dream eating monster demon. That got a full nine point nine on the bizarre scale. 

It jerked one arm forward and up, the motion robotic and twisted, reaching for Sam, who stood closer to the circle. It took a step forward, grasping and howled in pain when it hit the invisible barrier of the circle.

Dean crowed in silent victory. The circle worked! “Welcome to the world of flesh,” drawled, “That’s pain. Not so fun, is it?”

The Nightmare’s eyes slid off his brother and onto him. Good. “I will cause you pain, mortal. Release me.”

Yeah, sure, why hadn’t they thought of that before?

It pushed against the barrier again, with all its weight, and was actually flung backwards, off its feet. Inarticulate rage poured out of its throat as Sam finally remembered what they were here for and started chanting in pseudo-Latin.

At first nothing happened. 

The thing remained standing in the middle of the circle, head cocked to one side in a purely animalistic gesture, studying them and the prison around it.

Dean could tell the very moment it noticed the carob wood and bullets and runes and realized that it was really, truly trapped. Its head snapped forward and its eyes rose to meet his, black as midnight. A demon’s gaze, except that there was _movement_ in those black, inky eyes. Dreams, souls, nightmares, crowding behind the barrier of human eyeballs and Dean found himself longing for the green of Anne’s eyes behind the veil of darkness.

Then the Nightmare opened its mouth and _screamed_. 

Birds rose from the surrounding trees, something stirred in the forest, and Sam’s chanting was all but drowned out by the shrill banshee screech that seemed to go on forever and ever. Only the need to keep both eyes open and his weapon trained on that thing stopped Dean from curling up and pressing his hands to his ears as tightly as he could.

The Nightmare just stood there, still in Anne’s pajamas, screaming and screaming and screaming and somehow the fading twilight around them seemed to _resonate_ with it, to mold itself to the rise and fall of that never ending sound. Dean blinked and the world around him warped like a bad acid trip.

Sam’s chanting grew louder and faster, almost fast enough to stumble over words, but not quite. Focusing on his brother, the older man tried to block out the scream – an impossible feat. But it allowed him to hear Sam’s deep breath at the end of the lengthy incantation before he started over. 

Four times three verses. 

Twelve parts. Twelve runes, twelve silver bullets, twelve iron bullets, four candles made of wax, flame, wick. Three times four. Twelve. The most potent benevolent magical number. 

It was in the middle of Sam’s second repetition that the scream faltered for the first time. The Nightmare stumbled and caught itself, sneering at them in a show of teeth, a wordless threat.

“Filth,” it hisses sharply, spittle flying from Anne’s stolen mouth. “You dream of _blood_.” It licked its teeth and lips, rubbed hands over its newly stolen body, suggestive and slow, eager. It had seen the horrors inside their heads, the old hunts and bad injuries that sometimes rose in the dead of night, and it _liked_ what it saw.

Dean wanted to shoot it. Badly.

Then Sam took his second deep breath and it stumbled again, knees giving out. It fell forward, smacking against the edge of the circle and wailing in pain as smoke rose from its skin. It reared back and started screaming again.

The Nightmare screamed.

Sam chanted.

And it screamed.

The night grew darker, grew closer.

Dean gritted his teeth and hated Bobby just a bit for dumping this hunt on them. 

Sam chanted.

And it screamed.

The forest thrummed with the rhythm of the scream, a solid wall of evil surrounding them on three sides.

And he really hated that Nightmare for taking over Anne’s body because Anne was brave and funny and she knew weapons and demons and he liked her. Liked her like he hadn’t liked anyone since before Dad had run out on him. He could talk to her, even in his sleep. Sam liked her. 

And it screamed.

Sam chanted.

The ground around them turned dark and dead. Infertile. Soiled. Like it was about to crack open and spit hell onto earth.

And it screamed.

And then….

It stopped. 

Third time through the incantation it suddenly stopped and stood there, head lowered, messy blonde curls falling everywhere, dirty, unwashed and leaf-stained. It was staring, Dean realized, at its own midsection.

Inside the dark shirt and the sliver of bare, pale stomach, something moved. Moved like the shadows inside shadows in its eyes. Moved like it was alive. 

The night around them lost some of its sinister air, the air grew less heavy.

Sam just kept rattling off his Latin and the Nightmare’s stomach started visibly churning and twisting, like something was pushing against it from the inside. Dean had a horribly unfitting _Alien_ flashback and bit his lip hard to keep in a snicker. It didn’t work. 

Then the thing’s stomach seemed to distend outward and there was really nothing left to laugh at because it started screaming again and this time it wasn’t a scream meant to express anything but pain and rage. 

The world around them warped again, coming closer and closer, pressing in from all sides, trying to choke him and Sam, to squeeze them to death. 

The Nightmare was trapped inside that circle. 

But the Nightmare was dreams and dreams are wherever people sleep. 

“Brought down the ceiling,” Dean reminded himself with a wheeze, stepped closer to his brother, his legs made of lead and his knees of jelly.

The Nightmare fell backward, landing hard, back arched like a bowstring, taut and ready to break as something milky white shot from its midsection and into the night sky. The darkness that had accumulated around the circle made a grab for it, like a tendril reaching out, but it missed and then the thing was gone.

The next followed on the spot, then a third. Sam was still chanting, panting hard, sweat on his forehead, hands shaking. The air was growing thin, breathing was becoming hard and Dean could do nothing but fucking stand there and watch the show, because there was nothing to do, nothing to shoot and nothing to fucking kill.

The third wisp of white was joined by two more, then three, then five. Soul fragments, dreams, released. All those that had not been completely assimilated yet. In town, almost two dozen people were waking right now, one after the other, as their souls burst out of the Nightmare and into freedom.

With everyone that broke free, the endless scream grew louder, angrier, filled with rage and pure, untainted _hate_. The kind of hate no human being was capable of, inhuman and enormous, an entity onto itself. The hate of something that knew only death, blood, pain, knew only people’s darkest fantasies and fears. The hate of something, that in all its millennia of half life, had never seen daylight.

Dean wasn’t ashamed to admit that it scared the crap out of him.

Then the last wisp of soul tore free and Sam’s voice abruptly disappeared from the cacophony of sound. The scream died a scant second later.

Silence.

The darkness at the edge of the circle moved and writhed, like a living thing, tentacles reaching and stretching for the stars and the earth. The outline of the trees, the car back by the road, it had all disappeared. The only light came from the ethereal glow of four candles, the white salt and the baby pink hospital blanket twisted at the Nightmare’s feet.

Sam shuffled closer to his brother until their shoulders were touching. “It’s too dark to read,” he whispered, his eyes fixed on the thing in the circle, which was staring back unblinkingly. 

There was blood at the corners of its mouth and its fingers were bloody from where it had torn at its stomach in pain, but otherwise it seemed unharmed. It had just lost everything it had devoured in the past two months and it should have been weak. It didn’t even sway on its feet.

Dean fingered the silver crucifix in his pocket that they had planned to bind the Nightmare to once it was down. But now… Sam couldn’t even read the incantations anymore. 

Suddenly, the Nightmare laughed. Short and sharp, like the bark of a dog. “I am flesh now,” it hissed, “You cannot weaken me.”

Well, great. Knowing that beforehand would have been sort of great. Hole in their logic. Of course the thing would be less vulnerable now that it was anchored in the world of the living. Crap.

Dean sighed and Sam grunted and the night kept moving, like a boiling oil well. 

“And now,” the Nightmare drawled, lips curving up into that smile again, “You will dream.”

The darkness sped up, reaching toward them. Sam jerked backwards, pulling his brother with him.

“Oh,” Dean found himself saying as he fought a yawn. He was really too tired to run from that Nightmare. And they didn’t have any coffee. Maybe they should have brought coffee.

He looked down at the gun in his hand and frowned. It was very heavy. Maybe he could just…. Yes… yes…

“Dean!” Sam’s voice cut through the cobwebs in his head, sharp and loud. “Snap out of it!”

Snap out of what? He was just a bit tired. All he wanted was a little – 

“Shit,” he cursed and slapped himself with his free hand before glowering at the grinning Nightmare.

“Are you tired?” it asked, a parody of concern. 

“Fuck you,” he snarled and stepped on Sam’s foot as his brother sort of slouched next to him. 

The Nightmare wagged a scolding finger at him and the shadows at the edge of the circle closed in. They were without substance, could not harm the brothers in any way, except by extinguishing the last scraps of daylight.

But they could do one thing.

They could snuff the candles.

And they did.

A hiss and splutter and a quarter of the light they had guttered and died. 

It was growing darker, Dean thought. Time for bed. He hadn’t slept in _ages_ and he could barely hold his eyes open. He leaned sideways into Sammy, feeling his warmth seep through their clothes, a source of comfort. They used to sleep curled around each other, like kittens, when they were kids. 

Warm and safe. 

And so, so sleepy. 

This time, Sam didn’t snap at Dean. He yawned. “’Mmm tired, De’n.”

Quiet and childlike, Sammy sounded like he had at five, yawning extra wide to show off the gap in his teeth. Dean nodded. 

“’K, bro,” he whispered and let gravity pull him down. Sam followed and in a minute, they’d be asleep, finally. It’d been such a long day. 

But there was something still to do…

Something important.

They had to…

Sleep.

They needed…

Sleep.

No! Not sleep. There was something important, something that needed to be done before they could sleep. Confused, Dean looked around, searching for the source of his disquiet. If he could just sleep now…

_No!_

Balling his hand into a fist around his gun, he punched himself in the thigh as hard as he could and jolted a bit more awake. Enough to think. He smacked Sam upside the head hard enough to rattle his teeth.

“Dean!” Awareness. That was good. Very good. Almost as good as…

Dean looked up and saw Anne standing there, looking down at him and Sam with a frown. Behind her, around her, the darkness moved and…

Anne!

They had to… they needed… he couldn’t… sleep. They needed to sleep. So tired. But Anne… Anne was… where was Anne?

The Nightmare moved a bit to the side and the light of the last candle – why only one? There’d been four – caught something shiny on its chest. 

The charms. 

_Anne bending over, clutching her stomach, one hand wrapped around her charms, holding on tight, smiling through the pain, her hand on his chest, small and clammy, pushing, pushing… waking him up!_

The charms. 

There was no known way to kill a Nightmare.

But Dean had always had control over his dreams.

“Sammy, we need that necklace!”

“Wha’?”

Dean hit Sam again, biting his own tongue to cut through the fog, to stay aware and awake. “The charms. We need the fucking charms, Sammy!”

He pointed toward the Nightmare – not Anne, it had _eaten_ Anne and was wearing her carcass – and the glitter of three charms dangling around its neck.

“Why?”

“Trust me,” Dean snapped and tried to climb to his feet. 

No chance. Absolutely no chance. His mind might be working again for the moment, but his body was all but dead to the world. His limbs weighed a ton. Just hitting Sammy cost all of his energy and concentration. But they needed those charms. Anne had worn them inside the Nightmare. 

If they could get them…

But he couldn’t move and the circle would break if he crossed it. So how… 

Sammy. His _Shining_. The dreams. The headaches. 

He turned his heavy head to look at his brother and found him drowsy. The only time Sam had managed to do something, he had been scared out of his mind for Dean. How could he…

No matter, he had to try.

It took everything he had to reach up and pull Sam down to his level, to bring his mouth to his baby brother’s ear.

“Sorry, Sam,” he muttered, too quiet to hear. Sam twitched a bit.

Then Dean took a deep breath and yelled, half an inch from his brother’s ear, as loud as he could, “ _Get that necklace, NOW_!!!”

Sam jerked away from him so violently, he fell over, landing on his side, panting, wide-eyed. Panicking. 

Behind Dean, the Nightmare screamed. The panic in Sam’s eyes flickered and died, replaced by the dull veil of exhaustion as something small hit him in the chest and tinkled as it fell to the ground. Sam slumped, utterly spent.

It had worked!

It had actually, freaking worked! Dean could have kissed his brother. He finally let go of his gun, useless now anyway, and lunged forward - well, more like toppled - landing half on top of Sammy as he grabbed madly for the silver necklace Sam had managed to rip from the Nightmare’s neck. Never, never in his life had Dean been so grateful for his brother’s freakishness.

Now, if only this worked…

He grabbed Sam’s hand, pushed the three charms into it and clasped it with his own, so both of them were touching the cool metals. 

There was no known way to kill a Nightmare.

Then he let the next wave of exhaustion flood his system and carry him away. Into sleep.

Into the Nightmare.

He _really_ hoped he was right about this.

+


	11. Chapter 11

+

**Ten**

+

Darkness.

Sinking.

Drowning.

“Dean? Sam?”

Beneath him, someone groaned and by instinct alone, Dean recognized his brother and rolled off him, managing to land in a semi-upright position and force his eyes open.

Anne knelt a few feet away from them, swaying, pale as a corpse, eyes bloodshot, clothes stained with something dark brown. Blood. She shone like a beacon in the dark, the only thing of color in the endless blackness.

Dean blinked and when she was still there when he opened his eyes again, a grin split his face. 

“It worked!”

“What worked?” Anne demanded, looking worried and half dead. She let herself drop sideways so she was sitting, entirely too tired to even kneel.

“We found you.”

“You came in here voluntarily?! I told you, I can’t – “

“De’n?”

Sam stirred and Dean simply took his hand and waited until his brother came to. His nose was bleeding a bit. Result of the telekinesis. Dean felt guilty and Sam sat up, holding his head.

“What happened?”

“It pulled us under, Sammy.”

Visibly steeling himself, the youngest Winchester opened his eyes and fought down the nausea that threatened before looking first at his brother, then at Anne in surprise before swinging back around.

“You… yelled at me?”

Dean cringed and brought up their still joined hands, disentangling the necklace from their fingers. “I needed this and there was no way to get it other than you.”

A beat.

“You mean I actually… moved it?”

“Yup.”

Sam shook his head and immediately regretted the motion. He looked little better than Anne who was watching them silently, too exhausted to make herself heard. 

“For what?”

Big brother’s smile turned into a shit eating grin. “Last time we dreamed, Anne wore it. Hoped it would get us to her. We stood no chance at staying awake, so I figured, three’s better than two.”

“You hoped the charms would act as a link to her and fling us to wherever she was without any sort of proof?”

Okay, put like that, it sounded a bit farfetched. But hey, at least he’d still been thinking at all at that point.

“Worked, dinnit?”

Anne grunted and Sam crawled over to her, expression worried. Dean followed and handed her the necklace. She looked up at him, her eyes dull and colorless. “You used this to find me here?”

He nodded.

“And what now?”

Dean deflated, smile fading. He looked around. Nothing. Blackness. Darkness. Far away, nightmares flickered to life and died, like they had on all his other visits. But they were distant, barely more than specks of light and shape. 

“Where are we?”

“As far from the surface as it could kick me. I can’t even feel my body anymore.” Anne smiled crookedly and wriggled her fingers limply to illustrate her point. “Did your plan include a way of getting out of here alive?”

Somehow, she didn’t sound like she had much hope. Dean shrugged. “It’s a theory.”

“Then spill it, dude,” Sam commanded, wiping blood from his upper lip. He twisted around until he was sitting next to Anne on the nonexistent ground and pulled her unresisting head into his lap. Dean didn’t comment. The girl looked more dead than alive at this point. 

Instead he turned so he was facing in the opposite direction. Between them, they’d keep watch over her. For now. He wondered what the nightmare was doing in the waking world. One candle had still been burning when they’d been pulled under and the circle itself would give it trouble, too, even incomplete. But how long until in broke free? How long until it turned its attention inward and finished them off? Or what if it killed their bodies while they were defenseless?

Too many questions, no answers. One problem at a time. Focus on what you can do.

“I think I know how to kill it.”

Sam grunted and immediately contradicted, “Man, I told you, there’s – “

“- No known way to kill a Nightmare. I _know_. Listen. Essentially, if you ignore all the mumbo jumbo, it’s still just a dream, right? Bit big, pissed off, cannibalistic, monster of a dream.”

“Yeah.” Hesitant.

“You can influence dreams, Sammy. I managed to dream up a house in here. I figure if I can dream up a weapon… maybe that’s how you kill a dream. With dreams.”

“It’s a nice theory,” Sam admitted, “but there’s one little problem. Out there, it’s corporeal. In here, it’s not. So how do we kill it?”

Anne, who’d been lying silently between them, eyes closed as she listened, perked up. “I might be able to solve that problem.”

“How?”

She sat up, obviously dizzy, but forcing it back. “Did you go through my weapons?”

Both boys nodded.

“Did you find my scythe?”

“A scythe?” Sam asked, incredulous.

She nodded. “It’s red. Blade on one end, stake on the other. Double handed grip in the middle. Did you _see_ it?”

Sam automatically turned his eyes on Dean. He’d only seen the trunk once, but he was sure his brother had gone through it again, checking all the weapons out.

He nodded. “Big honkin’ thing? Shiny as hell? It zapped me when I touched it. Figured it had a protection spell on it and left it alone.”

Anne’s smile brightened visibly. “It’s not a spell. It’s the scythe itself. Can you dream it up for me?”

“Why?”

She straightened, steel in her spine, and smirked, “Because that baby can kill _anything_.”

Dean looked gleeful but Sam wasn’t sold. “But it’d still be just a dream version of the real thing.”

The older man pointed at the three charms around Anne’s neck. “So are those. But we got in here with the real thing. Maybe… maybe taking a body shifted a piece of the dreams into the real world? Look, Sam, it’s worth a try. Otherwise, we’re done for. We can’t wake up and sooner or later, it’s gonna get out of the circle.”

For a long minute, everyone was silent. Then Sam nodded. “Okay. Okay. Whatever. We’re dead anyway.”

He stood, pulling Anne with him. Dean followed suit.

“So, how do you plan on doing this?”

“Ehm…..” He closed his eyes. Focused. Remembered. A red and silver blade. A leather wrapped grip. A wooden stake at the end. Long. Longer than his arm. Smooth. Sleek. Vibrating with something that was almost… life?

Slowly, Dean held out one hand, palm up, concentrating hard. 

But there was a resistance, something pushing against his desires, his dreams. Something that didn’t want him to have a weapon. It pushed against his mind and body, squeezed him, made it hard to breathe, like the moving shadows had in the waking world. 

Startled, Dean realized this was what Anne had been protecting them from before. She couldn’t anymore. This time he had to protect himself. He pushed back.

And pushed and pushed and _pushed_. 

For a split second, he was sure he heard an enraged shriek. Then his will lashed out like a whip and formed, took shape, creating the image of the weapon in his mind. He caught it in his outstretched hand and promptly got zapped again.

He cursed and dropped it on reflex, but the scythe never fell. Anne caught it out of thin air with one hand, twirling it expertly before bringing it to a halt at her side. Dean looked up from his stinging hand in time to see her close her eyes and _bask_. 

There was no other word for what she did. She stood there and basked in the silent thrum of the weapon in her hand that Dean had felt vaguely before, but now could almost hear as a sound. Sam was staring at the thing in the blonde’s hand like it was about to bite him.

“It feels almost…”

“Alive?” Anne suggested, grinning. There was color on her face again other than dried blood. She smirked smugly, “It almost is. So, how do we get it here?”

There was no question who _it_ was. Nor was there any question whether or not Anne was up to fighting it. She was almost bouncing on the balls of her feet. It was like the weapon was a part of her that had been returned. 

This time it was Sam’s turn to step forward. “Leave that to me,” he said and turned away from them, taking a deep breath.

“Walking Nightmare,” he yelled at the top of his lungs and Dean shuddered because there was no echo in the stillness of the black around them. “Oneiros! Dream Demon! Son of Sleep! Dream God! Nightmare!”

Trust Sam to remember all those fancy titles after reading them only once. He kept repeating them, over and over, as loudly as he could. The last time he’d only had to say its name once to call it, but this time it was obviously distracted. It hadn’t come when they had discussed how to kill it. 

But, Dean knew, when Sam wanted something, he got it. It might take a while, but he always got it. 

There was no way to measure time in here, except by the flickering of nightmares. Nightmares inside nightmares. Dean shook his head, having long since given up on the logic of this particular nasty. In dreams anything goes, right? So there could be nightmares in nightmares and souls stumbling around the darkness, could be a manifestation of the monster in its own domain, its own body. They were inside the Nightmare and calling it to them. Logic had little to do with it. 

Then, like bloodhounds, Anne and Sam turned in the same direction at the exact same instance.

Looked like the Nightmare had finally listened.

It came as a cresting wave of darkness on the dark horizon, almost invisible, like the writhing shadows they had left behind with their bodies. The flickers around them grew faster, frantic, almost as if they were scared. Were there pieces of souls still left in those dreams even after centuries? 

Dean had no desire to find out.

The wave of darkness broke and rushed toward them, taking the shape of a pack of hounds for a second, of a hundred screaming, reaching people the next. Then it flickered into flames of black fire, then waves of water, then the hounds again, rushing closer, closer, closer, eating the distance faster than physically possible, coming toward them like a freight train at full speed, like a wall of brick headed for them, headed _through_ them and Dean felt his confidence falter. There was no way this would work.

No way in hell that a single girl with a single blade could kill that thing. It was nothing but a cloud of darkness, a shapeless, enormous blob of malevolence.

And they’d called for it. They’d brought it here. Because of his stupid, rotten plan. God, he should just leave the planning to Sam altogether. If they survived this. Which they wouldn’t. 

But maybe… maybe he could distract it. Give Sam and Anne time to get out. Distract it.

Okay. Plan.

But how?

Dream. 

Dream what? Ugly midget clown strippers? He’d barely managed a single weapon this time, when the Nightmare had been far away. He stood no hope of moving anything now.

What did that leave him with? No weapons, no dreams, no hope. Wow, depressing thought. He was about to die and thought in purple prose. 

Aaaand that was it. 

Sarcasm. 

The most wondrous weapon of the world. 

“Hey, ugly,” he called, ignoring Sam who turned to look at him incredulously. Shaddup, Sammy, they were all about to die and this was a last ditch effort at saving their sorry asses. “Aren’t you the big bad monster? Hiding behind a wall of scary black tricks. I’m scared. Look at me, shaking in my boots.”

He knocked his knees together, making a face, “So scared. You got any balls in there? Or did Mommy chop them off? Oh wait, you don’t have a Mommy. Poor little misunderstood thing.”

He was shooting blind, bringing up anything and everything that might sting. They whole Mommy thing was his complex and he knew it, but hey, who cared. 

“You wanna wear a human body? Then wear it and don’t hide from us, bitch!”

Amazingly, it seemed to work. The rolling wave of oblivion slowed down and started to shrink as a grating voice – now completely unlike Anne’s, because here it had no body – shrieked, “I will _devour_ you, mortal. I will feast on your dreams. You are mine now!”

“God, do you ever change your tune?”

Sam straightened, focusing on the enemy just like Dean had taught him when he’d been seven and always lost track of Dean during their tussles. Anne hefted the scythe by her side and smirked.

Looked like they were all on the same page now.

Well, all except the Nightmare. 

“I will rip your bodies to pieces!” it screeched and shrunk even further, until all that was left of the wall of darkness was a vaguely human shaped silhouette. Arms, legs, head. Even a nice neck to slice of. 

Maybe, just maybe, they’d get out of this alive.

“Wow, that the best you can do? Yell threats from over there?”

“You are within me! I am,” it started, still a safe distance away. Then it suddenly disappeared and reappeared a scant inch in front of Dean, grabbing at him with hands of shadow. “Everywhere,” it finished.

Then its fingers sank into Dean’s stomach and all he knew were cold and horror and pain. He was screaming, drowning, burning, hurting, bleeding, breaking, tearing, walking, running, crawling, falling, falling, falling, cracking, bursting, freezing, dying, dying, dying, endlessly, over and over and over, dying until the end of time in every way and every dream, in every nook and cranny of his own nightmares, falling. Dying. And then…

Nothing.

Sam was kneeling over him suddenly, worried face too close. Dean rolled to his side, panting, wheezing, feeling like he might puke. Shit. That had been… shit!

“Where…,” he managed, only to find the answer as he looked up. 

The Nightmare was a few yards away, crumpled to the ground with Anne marching toward it, scythe singing at her side as she spun it.

The Nightmare straightened, getting up with only a thought. Or a dream. Whatever. “You still fight me? I have your body. You have no power here.”

“Wrong,” Anne said and she sounded so sure that even the Nightmare seemed to falter for a moment. “You’re right. You took my body, you took my power. And you almost had me. But you see this?” she asked, holding up her weapon.

“You know what that is?”

And for the first time, the Nightmare stopped its gloating and actually _looked_. Looked, and hissed sharply. “Guardian!”

Anne wore the distant cousin of a smile. “Yes.”

Then she reached the thing and brought up her weapon, swinging it in a wide arch and bringing it down on the thing’s neck. 

It ducked, swung, kicked at her, human motions from an inhuman thing. Anne jumped over the kick, twisted, landed behind the Nightmare and sliced at its midsection. Wisps of smoke rose from it, but the injury wasn’t deep. 

It spun, lunging for the blonde with a primitive snarl and the entire world around them lurched with the motion surging toward the girl who jumped again, somersaulted, kicked the Nightmare in the head and landed, bringing her blade down again.

Fast. Precise. Strong. More than human. Dean wondered what exactly Anne was and decided he didn’t give a damn. She was saving their asses and that was all that counted. End of story. And man, was she ever gorgeous doing it.

One more maneuver, attack, duck, spin, avoid, and Anne brought the scythe up in a single smooth motion, slashing downward with unstoppable force and speed and anger, cutting the thing’s head clean off.

One last scream tapered off into nothing as the shadowy head fell and turned to smoke and all around them, the flickering nightmares disappeared, like TVs being switched off and the darkness bled into trees, bled into a sky and stars.

The Nightmare dissolved.

Dean gasped, rolled off Sam and puked his guts out.

+


	12. Chapter 12

+

**Eleven**

+

As soon as he was finished gagging on a feeling of vertigo more intense than any he’d ever felt before, Dean slumped sideways, leaning against Sam with an exhausted sigh. 

They’d won.

He could still feel fingers digging around his insides.

He wiped his mouth before heaving his body onto its knees and checking on his brother. Pulse steady, no obvious injuries, no blood. Good. Why wasn’t the idiot awake then?

Just then, as if he’d heard the question, Sam jerked and rolled onto his stomach, emptying it of all its contents at impressive speeds. Dean grimaced as he lay a heavy hand on his brother’s nape to let him know he wasn’t alone and tried not to feel relieved that he wasn’t the only one whose stomach had gotten upset after getting jerked around between sleeping and waking.

He dug through his pockets for the napkins he knew he’d stuffed in there and handed one of them to Sam, who wiped his mouth before throwing the thing into the semi-dark. Funny, now that the whole thing was over, it wasn’t even full dark yet.

They’d freakin’ won.

“That,” Dean finally said as Sam sat up and scooted away from the two puddles of vomit, “Was actually sort of anticlimactic. Apart from the puking.”

“Speak for yourself,” a rough voice warned from behind them and both brothers shot around to see Anne lying flat on her back, still within the circle of salt. She didn’t seem injured beyond what they had seen before the Nightmare had pulled them under, but she lay very still, just relearning how to breathe. She was wearing her necklace again. 

“I’ve been waiting for this for two months, guys.”

She turned her head enough to look at them both and through the dirt, blood, leaves and clammy pallor, she grinned like a loon.

Dean snorted and stumbled to his feet, still feeling like someone had exchanged his bones for jelly and made his way over to the blonde, Sam hot on his heels. 

“You alright?” he asked as he stood over her, resisting the inane urge to poke her with his toes to see if she would move.

She blinked once, slowly and then happily purred, “Every single inch of my body _hurts_.”

“And that’s good how?” Sam wanted to know, one hand absently freeing his brother’s back from leaves and other forest debris.

“Cuz I can feel it.”

Right. Obviously, two months without a body had slightly unbalanced their fellow hunter. 

“Think you can stand?” Relevant question. The girl had been in a coma for more than seven weeks. Her limbs were probably noodles. Only she nodded confidently and held up both hands in silent request.

Each man took one of her limbs and pulled her to her feet, where she wobbled for a moment before catching herself and resuming her grinning. She dropped Sam’s hand with her left and kept Dean’s in her right. 

“I think we skipped this part. Hi, I’m Buffy Summers, pleasedtameetcha.”

She shook his hand and Dean chuckled out loud. “Dean Winchester, pleasure’s mine. We thought your name was Anne?”

Buffy – holy hell, once they were all cleaned up and not hurting all over, Dean was _so_ going to poke fun at that – frowned in confusion. 

“Your journal. You wrote Josie Anne was named after you. We assumed…,” Sam offered by way of explanation before holding out his own hand. “Sam Winchester,” he added when Buffy’s expression cleared and she shook the offered appendage.

“Well, Buffy _Anne_ Summers, actually. There’s no way Faith would have named her child Buffy, sister or not. Thank god.”

She took back her hand and looked around, at the circle, the candles, the bag of weapons and the book Sam had dropped when they’d gone down. Then she took in the brothers from head to toe and back, simply soaking up the solidness of them, if they had to guess. 

They let her until she suddenly started swaying and shivering from the cool fall night. Sam plucked the hospital blanket from the ground before declaring it a lost cause with a grimace and stripping off his own jacket to wrap around the girl. She protested, but all three knew that she didn’t mean it and she didn’t fight when Sam pulled her into his side and led her to the car while Dean collected their things and destroyed the circle, making sure they left nothing behind that could be tied to them or the missing Jane Doe. The blanket he set on fire.

Then he shouldered the duffle bag and followed Sam and A- Buffy toward the car. He found both of them curled up in the backseat where Sam played heater for the shivering blonde.

Dean raised a silent eyebrow, asking how bad off Buffy was. He received a shrug in return and a motion that he interpreted to mean the girl was simply going into a mild shock. Being slammed back into your body so abruptly after such a long time would do that, he guessed as he slipped behind the wheel and started the car.

Next stop: Bed.

+

Thirty minutes later, Buffy crashed into Sam’s bed and was asleep – really asleep, for the first time in months – before she’d managed to pull a blanket over herself.

Sam tucked her in while Dean took a fast and hot shower and then they traded places, one monitoring Buffy for any aftereffects of her ordeal, the other cleaning up. They spent an hour waiting for any signs of unrest or sickness and when they found none, the finally gave in to their own exhaustion and crawled into Dean’s bed.

There was a moment of awkwardness born of two grown men trying to share a bed made for only one. Then Dean huffed quietly and gave up on being manly and tough, rolling onto his side and throwing an arm around his brother’s waist. 

If they didn’t try to stay away from each other, they’d fit just fine and the awkwardness was forgotten in the wake of comfort and warmth and sleep. Besides, they’d shared a bed practically until Sam had gone to Stanford. Dad got one, the boys got the other. Their minds balked a bit after so long, but their bodies remembered the routine of sleeping with the other in a tight space all too well.

Before long, they were both out like lights.

+

It was the smell of coffee that woke them both after a solid twelve hours of sleep and they sat up, still mostly on autopilot, following their noses toward the heavenly stench of bitter, black diner coffee.

Then someone giggled and they both snapped fully awake.

Buffy was sitting at the table, half eaten donut in hand, watching them both with an amused expression. 

“You look a bit like zombies on a brain-hunt right there,” she informed them brightly.

She had obviously found her car keys on the nightstand and made the most of it, getting her clothes and toiletries, washing and dressing. She looked like a new person with washed hair falling past her shoulder blades, wearing tight jeans and a loose top, sitting upright, in full control of her body. There was no sign of the exhaustion that had torn at her the night before.

Dean grunted a non-verbal response to her observation and dropped into the other chair, leaving Sam to sit at the end of one of the beds as they both grabbed coffee and downed about half of it in one go. Then they focused on the food and grew wide-eyed.

Pancakes, bagels, eggs, hash browns, donuts, extra coffee, and some fruit salad on top. And enough of all of it to feed several hungry bears. Or three hungry hunters. Buffy, despite her small frame, ate almost as much as Dean, who watched her with amazement before putting it down to the novelty of eating after months of liquid diet through a tube. 

“You look good,” Sam finally said as he pushed his second helping of eggs away half- eaten, looking like a content cat.

“Thanks,” Buffy chirped, smiling again. It a far cry from the smiles she’d given them in her coma. This smile was still tainted with sadness and resignation, but they were old aches, pains long passed. This smile was bright and happy, right here, right now. It was contagious.

“In fact,” Dean said between two bites of hash brown, “You look a bit too good.”

And that beautiful smile fell and from underneath jeans and blonde hair a warrior emerged, tense and ready to run. Not to fight though, Sam noted. He had noticed the outline of a knife at the small of her back earlier, but she didn’t reach for it now. That, more than her words, told him that she was trustworthy.

“About that,” she started, shifting in her chair, “Do you guys buy into the whole _if it’s supernatural, we kill it_ thing?”

Dean swallowed and shrugged, ostensibly dismissing the subject. Sam knew better. His brother knew very well where this was going and doing his usual goofy and dumb act to keep the situation cool. “Depends. If it hurts others? Yes. If it’s not meant to exist? Yes. And sure as hell if it messes with Sammy.”

“So if I told you, purely hypothetically, that I’m technically not entirely human, you wouldn’t jump the gun and shoot me with it?”

This time Dean made no pretenses. He simply leaned back in his chair and focused green eyes on Buffy, staring at her frankly and openly. “Would a gun kill you?”

Buffy hesitated briefly, then nodded. “Yes.”

“What are you?” Sam decided to cut in, because he felt the slightest bit sorry for the blonde. She’d protected them, killed the Nightmare, saved their asses. She was good in his books and he knew that Dean thought the same way. He was just testing her.

Buffy’s gaze didn’t move from Dean’s. “Do you guys know what a vampire slayer is?”

Sam’s eyes widened. “No way,” he breathed, awed.

Dean had a bit more control over his facial features and only raised one sharp eyebrow. “As in one girl to save the world? All that lore?”

Buffy nodded again. “Yep. Created when the essence of a demon was shoved into a defenseless girl and bound there, forever. I’m the last true slayer in the world.”

Last? Sam had thought the line was supposed to be never-ending, one protector for the world at any given moment in the history of mankind. But then he knew better than most that the information in books didn’t always hold up when there were actual people involved. The human factor. It tended to mess up any account of events.

But they’d both read the stories as kids, encouraged by the thought that there was an _actual_ superhero out there, fighting the good fight. Now, years later, seeing Buffy sitting across from them, obviously human and vulnerable and fragile but also a hunter through and through, he understood that slayers weren’t exactly superheroes. But they were definitely not villains.

“But you only use your power for good?” Dean asked, face straight.

“Yup. Totally. That, and cheating at arm wrestling.”

And that… really said all that needed saying.

There was a moment of silence as they all relaxed, letting the tension of the past few minutes fade away. Buffy was good in the brothers’ books and they were good in hers. They were on the same side of the fight. End of story. 

“So,” Sam asked as he watched his brother help himself to the leftover eggs and dig in. “What do you plan to do right now? And what time is it, for that matter? We gotta call Bobby, Dean.”

A grunt was his only response as Buffy shrugged. “Early,” she supplied, “I couldn’t really sleep, so I’m up since… well, most of the night actually. Slept long enough to heal up and then…” She shuddered, “Not really keen on dreaming, you know?

Nods all around. Sam didn’t think he’d mind if he didn’t dream at all for a while. 

“As for plans, I have no idea. I was out of the game for quite a while, so I guess I’ll play catch up. First I’ll have to drop by the hospital though, let them know I’m alive and not kidnapped and sold or something.”

Both boys shuddered slightly at the reminder that they had technically just added kidnapping charges to their laundry list of crimes. Yeah, better if Buffy went and set some minds at ease before they found their mug shots on CNN.

Again.

“And then I’ll have to find someone to check over my car after just sitting there for months.”

Immediately, the older man perked up. “Want me to look her over?”

He’d been itching to get a look under the Mustang’s hood for days, but, car enthusiast that he was, he would never touch the car without express permission.

Buffy agreed easily and after the men dressed, the three relocated outside with their coffee. Sam and Buffy sat on the stairs leading up to the porch that ran along the front of all rooms and Dean all but disappeared inside the Mustang, making cooing noises every now and again.

They chatted easily, Sam catching their fellow hunter up on things she had missed while in her coma, including the long and sad list of the names of the dead caused by the yellow-eyed demon.

Buffy acknowledged the loss of a lot of good hunters, but it was obvious there was no real, personal grief there. She had known none of them, opting to stay away from those hardcore believers that anything supernatural needed to be dead. 

Their coffees were long gone by the time Dean closed the hood and asked, with his best puppy dog eyes, if he could take the car for a test drive. Buffy hesitated. “I don’t think you _can_ drive that car,” she finally confessed when Dean added in a pout.

He immediately switched to offended and she hurried to explain, “Not because of you. Just… I totaled three cars when I was a teenager. Afterwards, no-one would even let me near one.”

Here, Dean blanched eyes automatically going to his baby parked two doors down. Sam didn’t bother hide his laugh.

“An old… boyfriend eventually figured out why I’m so hazardous on cars because he had the same problems. He just never thought I’d have them, too.”

“What’s that?” Dean was still suspicious. He trusted people with his life easier than with his car. Only Sam topped the car on his brother’s list of priorities.

“Supernatural reflexes and instincts. I react much faster than a human and when I try to translate that into controlling a car, things go whacky. My friend, who happened to be a reformed vampire, before you ask, knew this guy in LA who tuned cars for the less than human and got me the Mustang. I can drive it just fine, but I’ve never tried to let a human drive it. It’s kinda… sensitive?”

Of course, instead of being dejected, Dean perked up even more. Not only a beautiful car, but a beautiful car that presented a challenge. He wheedled Buffy for so long that she gave in simply to get him to shut up and turn those eyes elsewhere. He’d get to drive the ‘stang. Outside of town. Where there was lots of room and little to crash into. 

And of course it had to happen _right now_.

Sam sighed, shook his head, argued for the sake of arguing and went to check them out of the motel without a proper fight because Dean so rarely wanted anything and now… now his time was running out and Sam could say no to him even less than before. 

Whatever Dean wanted, wherever he wanted to go, whatever he wanted to do, Sam would make it happen. He had to. He didn’t think he could live with himself otherwise.

Still, it didn’t seem fair. Dean had looked after Sam for twenty-five years almost, and Sam only got to take care of him for another eleven months.

Sometimes Sam hated Dean for that.

+

They found an empty parking lot and parked the Impala at the very edge of it before Buffy handed her car keys to Dean, who was grinning like a madman at the time. Impossibly, his smile grew wider as he slipped into the driver’s seat and started the engine, which – thanks to his tender care – purred like a big, lazy cat.

Then the other two hunters sought refuge on the Impala’s hood and watched the oldest of them spin around the parking lot, whooping loudly every time he underestimated the car’s reaction time. 

Sam and Buffy picked up their conversation from the morning seamlessly and she told him with a grimace how the Nightmare had gotten to Hollow Springs in the first place. The first victim, the teenaged girl, had worked part time in an antique shop and had broken a china bottle that had been centuries old and come from Asia, where someone had probably bound the Nightmare to it.

She wasn’t entirely sure how it had gone down, but that bottle was the only reasonable explanation for the Nightmare showing up out of nowhere. Plus, the girl had broken the bottle the day before she’d fallen into a coma. Apparently, the Nightmare had had a twisted sense of gratitude toward the one that had freed it. 

Buffy just shuddered, shrugged, and cursed violently when Dean almost wrapped her car around a lamp post. He was slowly learning to control the wicked machine, but it still bucked occasionally, overreacting to a twist of the wheel or a tap on the brake. 

The slayer, deciding she’d rather not watch, scooted backwards until she could lie down and soak in the late afternoon sun, letting it soothe away the aches that still had to linger, super healing or not. 

The motion caused her charms to slip out from under her shit with a silvery sound and Sam found himself reaching for them before his mind caught up and he blushed. But the blonde made no move to pull away as he rolled the star and cross through his fingers.

“Iron and silver,” he found himself murmuring.

She smiled and added, “Star and cross. This is gonna sound ridiculous, but I actually felt it when they took it off me at the hospital.”

Sam shook his head. “I believe you. It saved our lives last night. Without it, we never would have found you in there.”

She shrugged, not saying anything and leaving Sam to his memories of the night before. They were still fuzzy in places but he remembered, quite clearly, his brother’s voice in his ear, loud enough to make his head ring, telling him to get that necklace. 

And he had.

The implications of that scared the shit out of him. 

But somehow, here and now, making a new friend in the sunshine while watching his brother laugh freely and have fun, he couldn’t quite muster the amount of worry he should have. For still being a freak, for never escaping his parents’ murderer, for Dean’s deal and the minutes, seconds, hours, trickling through their fingers like water, gone forever and so very, very finite. 

Dean had promised, in his own wordless way, that they would talk after this hunt and they would. Eventually. Soon. About the deal and about Sam’s _Shining_. Maybe… maybe there was a way for Sam to use his new abilities to help Dean. Maybe. 

“What’s the last charm?” He asked, taking the small vial between thumb and forefinger, pushing all other thoughts away. Dean wasn’t the only master at avoiding complicated, emotional messes in this family.

She scrunched up her nose and confessed, “Actually, it’s just dirt.”

“Dirt?”

“Graveyard dirt.” And Sam, who knew all about magical properties of all kinds of dirt and soil, heard the words under the words and knew that this last charm wasn’t magical at all. 

“From whose grave?”

Buffy took a deep breath, sought out her car driving figure eights around two lamp posts and said, “Mine.”

Carefully, Sam dropped the charms back on her chest and laid his hand in his lap. “You have a grave?”

“I was dead,” she said, still watching Dean’s inane patterns across the parking lot. “Dead and buried. Six months gone.”

“Then how – “

“Friends. Dangerous magical artifact. Lots of mojo. And hey presto, one resurrected slayer, fresh out of heaven.”

Heaven? Sam looked at her and expected wings to sprout from her back and light to illuminate her bright white, for choirs to sing and clouds to float past. Nothing happened. 

Heaven.

She’d been to heaven.

And all this time, he had wondered if such a thing even existed and now… Dean was going to hell. Buffy had been to heaven. And yet she lived. She lived and breathed and…

“Hey Buffy? Why’d you take this hunt?”

She looked up at him, squinting into the sun at his back, and shrugged. “Dunno. Felt right.”

Sam smiled and the pressure in his neck and temples finally eased, the feeling of foreboding and _knowing_ fading. It looked like he’d found what he had been looking for. 

Looking at Buffy and finding her with her eyes closed, lying in the sun, completely at ease next to him, he thought that maybe he wasn’t the only one. Heaven, hell, dying, living, deals and nightmares, dreams, visions, family and crosses, stars and dirt.

Somehow, all that fit together.

“Bobby, the hunter who helped us out with the research, said he wants to meet you.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool by me,” Buffy said, not even opening her eyes.

Sam jumped to his feet and tried to flag down his brother, who merely waved and hollered at them as he rushed past, much too fast, laughing loudly enough to be heard over the thrum of the engine.

With a sigh, the younger Winchester sat back down. They weren’t in a hurry today and there was that haunted house about five hours from here that they wanted to check out eventually. He didn’t think Buffy would mind the little detour.

As for Bobby, well, they’d get there. 

Eventually.

+

The End…. 

…for now

+

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And then there were none. 
> 
> If you enjoyed this ride, I'd appreciate a comment or two. 
> 
> If you want more, I'll start uploading the next story in the series within the week. Pinkie promise.

**Author's Note:**

> At the risk of sounding cliched: positive reinforcement makes me work faster. :)


End file.
